The forthcoming snap election is shaping up to be a battle between the ruling coalition and the newly formed Centrist Reform Alliance (CRA), in what will be among the most peculiar Lower House races in decades.
The peculiarity comes from the strange bedfellows that have joined together following the fracturing of previous political relationships ¡ª none more so than Komeito and the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP) forming the CRA.
The CRA promises to offer voters an alternative to the ruling coalition, but its branding is a misnomer, as it is not ¡°centrist¡± in any definable way, its members are hardly beacons of ¡°reform¡± and their ¡°alliance¡± is tenuous at best. More appropriately, it would best be characterized as a temporary political arrangement focused on salvaging political relevancy and founded upon cooperation between vote-generating machines. These opposition parties will spend the next two weeks attempting to convince Japanese voters otherwise.
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