Ruling and opposition parties agreed to convene a special Diet session on Nov. 11, but they failed to reach a consensus on anything else.

The parties on Nov. 5 could not even settle on a date in the hung parliament for a vote to name the prime minister. The opposition bloc demanded a promise of substantive Diet debates first.

The ruling Liberal Democratic Party and coalition partner Komeito lost their majority in the Oct. 27 Lower House election.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told a meeting of the Lower House parliamentary groups on Nov. 5 that the special Diet session will open on Nov. 11.

However, Yasukazu Hamada, an LDP lawmaker who chaired the meeting, told reporters that the opening date was the only thing that the participants agreed upon.

While the coalition parties proposed a four-day session with a vote on the prime minister on Nov. 11, the opposition parties called for a longer session for comprehensive debates.

Before the meeting, the Diet affairs chiefs of four opposition parties agreed to demand debates at the Budget Committee and the Deliberative Council on Political Ethics, the latter to discuss issues concerning the LDP’s fund-raising scandal.

The four are the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, Nippon Ishin (Japan Innovation Party), the Democratic Party for the People and the Japanese Communist Party.

The votes in both chambers to name the prime minister are usually held on the first day of the special Diet session.

Despite the coalition’s lack of a majority, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who took office on Oct. 1, is expected to be named prime minister again.

Nippon Ishin and the DPP said they will not comply with a CDP request to vote for its president, Yoshihiko Noda, even in an expected run-off, which is held between the top two finishers in the first round if no party leader receives a majority of votes.

Nippon Ishin, which won 38 seats in the Lower House election, and the DPP, which increased its strength fourfold to 28 seats, said party members will cast ballots for their respective leaders.

Ishiba’s new Cabinet will remain precarious, however.

“An administration is extremely unstable if (the Lower House) could pass a no-confidence motion against the Cabinet at any moment,” a mid-ranking LDP lawmaker said.

The Ishiba Cabinet faced a no-confidence motion submitted by the CDP, Nippon Ishin, the DPP and the JCP on Oct. 9. It was not voted on because Ishiba dissolved the Lower House that day for a snap election.

The LDP plans to clinch a majority in the lower chamber with Komeito and the DPP, although DPP leader Yuichiro Tamaki ruled out joining the ruling coalition outright.

Ishiba, who is the LDP president, told party executives on Nov. 5 to advance policy consultations with the DPP and other parties while centering on the coalition with Komeito.

Itsunori Onodera, chairman of the LDP’s Policy Research Council, and his DPP counterpart, Makoto Hamaguchi, agreed on Nov. 5 that the two parties will start concrete discussions on a package of economic measures and a supplementary budget as early as this week.

Mitsunari Okamoto, Komeito’s policy affairs chief, also met with Hamaguchi on Nov. 5.

Traditionally, the ruling parties screen draft budgets and bills before they are submitted to the Diet, a process that critics say effectively reduces Diet deliberations to mere “skeletons.”

In the LDP, the divisions responsible for individual policy areas, such as foreign affairs and national defense, first examine budget proposals and legislation for reviews at the Policy Research Council and final approval at the General Council.

But with the coalition no longer holding a majority in the lower chamber, the long-standing practice could change.

Tamaki said political parties should establish a new system to build a consensus on Diet floors.

“Until now, the LDP and Komeito could pass everything through the Diet by sheer force of numbers once it clears their in-house screening process, but not anymore,” Tamaki said on a TV program on Nov. 3.

History shows that a Cabinet tends to be short-lived if the ruling parties lack a majority.

In April 1994, Tsutomu Hata of the New Frontier Party formed a non-LDP Cabinet, but the ruling coalition lost a majority in the Lower House after the Japan Socialist Party, the predecessor of the Social Democratic Party, pulled out.

The Hata Cabinet resigned en masse 64 days after its inauguration, making it Japan’s second-shortest administration after World War II.

In a Lower House election in 1979, the LDP gained 248 seats, eight short of a majority. A no-confidence motion against the Cabinet of Masayoshi Ohira passed the following year, with anti-Ohira LDP lawmakers boycotting the vote.

Toru Yoshida, a professor of comparative politics at Doshisha University, said the government in many European countries represents “the will of the people” through the two stages of an election and parliament.

“In forming a majority after an election, political parties negotiate with each other to coordinate policies and allocate Cabinet posts and form, as it were, the will of the people in parliament,” he said.

Yoshida compared Japan’s political landscape after the Oct. 27 Lower House election to the situations in Italy, Spain and Portugal, where an election failed to immediately produce a majority in parliament in recent years.

He said a coalition government is not necessarily unstable and that Japanese voters should focus on how the ruling parties conduct policy consultations and reach a consensus.