Japan’s centre-left opposition Democratic party won a crushing victory over the long-ruling conservative Liberal Democrats on Sunday, redrawing the political landscape of the world’s second largest economy.

The result – the first time since the LDP’s founding in 1955 that any other party has won an electoral majority in the Diet’s lower house – gave the DPJ a mandate to pursue its campaign policies of taming the nation’s powerful bureaucrats and rolling out generous child allowances and welfare payments.