Japan Ruling Party Headed for Big Win, Analyst Says : Election: He predicts women voters will return to the fold in July contests for the upper house.

TOKYO â€”  Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa will win a victory of historic proportions and solidify his power in the July 26 election for the upper house of Parliament, a leading Japanese political analyst predicted Monday.

Minoru Morita, who forecast three months in advance the devastating defeat that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party suffered in the last upper house election, told foreign correspondents that Miyazawa’s Liberal Democrats will win at least 71 of the 126 seats up for election.

Never before has the ruling party won that many seats in an upper house election held separately from a lower house election.

Speaking at the Foreign Press Center, Morita said a rebellion by women voters who deprived the ruling party of its upper house majority in 1989 had ended. Only a few older women who remember World War II are likely to be swayed against the Liberal Democrats by passage of a law to dispatch noncombat troops overseas to participate in disaster relief and U.N. peacekeeping operations, he said.

“There will be no issue that would cause female voters to behave differently than male voters,� Morita said.

Morita predicted that all opposition parties will lose seats, with the Socialists suffering the worst setback.

Even growing sluggishness in the economy is expected to help the Liberal Democrats, who are conservative by Japanese political standards, because Japanese voters traditionally turn to the conservatives to manage the economy during downturns, he said.

Only 40 Liberal Democrats are not up for reelection, however, and even a 71-seat victory would give Miyazawa’s party just 111 seats, 16 short of a majority in the 252-member chamber. But a newly created informal alliance with two centrist opposition groups--the Buddhist-backed Komei (Clean Government) Party and the Democratic Socialist Party--will give the ruling party a working majority, Morita predicted.

The upper house must approve all bills except treaties and the national budget.

Miyazawa, the analyst said, has strengthened his position in the ruling party by winning enactment of the law on peacekeeping troops. Revelations of scandals involving Socialists and the illness of Foreign Minister Michio Watanabe, officially described as gallstones, also bolstered the 72-year-old prime minister, Morita said. Watanabe had been considered Miyazawa’s most likely successor.