Japan has a candidate shortage for local elections due to declining population

Tokyo: Japan’s shrinking population has led to a shortage of candidates for local elections being held across the country on Saturday, with candidates running uncontested in about 40 per cent of nearly 1,000 districts, Nikkei Asia reported. Voters will select governors in nine prefectures, mayors in six major cities, and assembly members in 41 prefectures and 17 large cities on Sunday. The government took steps across Japan to motivate candidates to participate in regional legislative assemblies, amid shortages due to a declining population and an ageing society but failed to yield positive results. In 375 town and village assembly elections held as part of unified local polls in 2019, 93 saw no competitive races, with the share of uncontested seats hitting a record high of 23.3 per cent, according to reports. Japan is facing a “now or never” situation and if action is not taken to arrest its declining birth rate, the country will “disappear”. These are the warnings issued by the country’s prime minister Fumio Kishida and his senior adviser recently. After Kishida sounded the alarm on the nation’s population crisis this January, his aide  Masako Mori, in an interview with _Bloomberg_ this week , said: “If we go on like this, the country will disappear”. Her comments came just days after Japan announced in late February that the number of babies born last year plunged to a record low. At 1.3, Japan has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. This is well below the rate of 2.1 which is the “replacement level” required to ensure a stable population.

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