What next in Japan after a stunning electoral defeat for the country's long-serving ruling party?

Live from the BBC World Service. This is the Marketplace Morning Report.

We'll blame with you again today, thanks for being with us.

Yes, the world's fourth largest economy wakes up this morning to plenty of political

uncertainty after the ruling coalition led by the Liberal Democratic Party fared far worse

in this weekend's national elections

than many had expected. The BBC's Steve Lye is in Tokyo, so what factors led to

the result? Yeah so the two big things, one is the string of scandals related to funding for political parties

that his party had been embroiled in for months and months leading up to the elections.

In fact, he only came to power as a result of the

previous Prime Minister Fumika Shita stepping down over these scandals. So he was

sort of put in place to try and improve the image of the party and trying to

go into this election and come

out with a strong mandate that whole decision process is really backfired on him and

the second thing is with the economy people in Japan have been feeling the

pinch with wages that hadn't risen for three decades

and the country had moved from deflation into inflation in the last year, meaning that goods and

services had just become more and more expensive in Japan and they didn't have wages that were keeping up.

So Japanese people were being felt poorer and at the same time, you know, the leading party was having

all these scandals where prominent politicians were revealed to be taking kickbacks and receiving funds and

it all just left such a bad taste in their mouths that they've taken it to the ballot box to show

how they feel.

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