TOKYO: Japan’s House of Representatives, at its plenary meeting Thursday, voted down no-confidence motions against Japanese Prime Minister KISHIDA Fumio’s cabinet and Lower House Speaker Hiroyuki Hosoda.

The motions were introduced by the leading opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan earlier the same day.

The ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner, Komeito, opposed both motions while the CDP, the Social Democratic Party, which is the CDP’s parliamentary ally, and the Japanese Communist Party supported them.

Meanwhile, Lower House lawmakers from two other major oppositions — Nippon Ishin no Kai (Japan Innovation Party) and the Democratic Party for the People — moved in line with ruling camp members in the vote on the motion targeting the cabinet and abstained from the vote on the motion against Hosoda.

“We’ve gained confidence. We want to continue to fulfil our responsibility and meet expectations,” Kishida later told reporters.

At the Lower House meeting before the vote on the motion against the cabinet, CDP head Kenta Izumi criticized that the Kishida government’s measures to tackle price hikes “lack a strategy” and that Kishida has demonstrated his self-touted “ability to listen” not to people who are tormented by higher prices but to the United States, the Bank of Japan and former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Before the vote on the motion against Hosoda, who called for a review of the planned reallocation under law of 10 Lower House seats in single-seat electoral constituencies, Akiko Okamoto, a CDP lawmaker, said he is the “least suitable person for a speaker.”

Okamoto also blamed Hosoda for “not fulfilling his accountability ” over his alleged sexual harassment of female reporters and female workers at the LDP.

But those CDP contentions failed to win broad-based support from the opposition camp, at a time when each party is trying to distinguish itself from others ahead of the election this summer for the House of Councillors, the upper chamber of the Diet, the country’s parliament.

Due to the submissions of the two motions, meetings of seven Upper House committees were postponed.

A bill to establish a government agency for children and family affairs, too, was put off to Tuesday. The LDP and the CDP agreed to enact it on Wednesday, the last day of the current ordinary Diet session.

The parties also confirmed that Kishida will attend an Upper House Budget Committee meeting Monday to answer questions and that a bill will be enacted Wednesday to prevent people from ending up appearing in pornographic videos against their will.

JIJI Press