So now it appears Koizumi will dissolve his government and seek a snap election.
The main opposition party is demanding Mr. Noda first dissolve parliament for a snap election.
On April 21, President Jacques Chirac called a snap election, ten months ahead of the regular schedule.
AKP's surviving parliamentarians would remain as independents in sufficient numbers to be able to force another snap election.
In early August 2005 the then-prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, called a snap election to push through postal privatisation.
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If a snap election were held, Labour might perhaps be able to form a government on its own.
Mr Noda may prefer to see his twin aims passed into law and then call a snap election.
He has written to Gordon Brown saying it is a matter of "urgency", given the speculation about a snap election.
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And if Mr Brown's failure to call a snap election hurt him politically, it also raised the bar for Mr Cameron.
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The electorate is entitled to gauge candidates in the hurly-burly of a full-blown campaign, not in the equivalent of a snap election.
Mr. Maduro, supported by the formidable campaign machinery of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela, is considered the favorite in a snap election.
Arroyo may realize that if a snap election is called, she would have to face other candidates (including possibly Estrada), with no guarantee of victory.
They say that later this summer he might dissolve parliament and call a snap election, aiming to campaign on a pledge to abandon nuclear power.
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Catalunia has a snap election coming up in which the major real question is whether to demand more, or even possibly total, independence from Madrid.
Chancellor Schroeder called for a snap election that year and a few months later found himself handing over the keys to the Chancellery to Angela Merkel.
Whether the prime minister plumps for a snap election in June or waits for the end of his term in November now hinges on the welfare-reform talks.
You would probably see a second attempt to form a national government in the wake of a controlled default, uncontrolled would almost certainly lead to a snap election.
Nikola Gruevski, leader of the centre-right VMRO-DPMNE, won a snap election in June 2011 and made a deal with his party's Albanian coalition partner to form a government.
Talk that Japan's prime minister may call a snap election for parliament's lower house at the same time as the upper-house poll in July will not die away.
At the moment the most likely result of a snap election - as the ever-acute Conservative Home website points out here - would be a Labour government.
That initially prompted Mr Berlusconi to favour a snap election.
Mr Cameron's speech, perhaps his best to a Tory conference since he impressed enough to see off Mr Brown's mooted snap election in 2007, showed an appetite for the fight.
Tory backbenchers, knowing that the Lib Dems are unlikely to provoke a snap election while they are languishing at around 10% in the polls, implore Mr Cameron to override their concerns.
Berlusconi turned his attention to politics in 1993 when he formed the center-right Forza Italia Party and the following year, in a snap election, he won the post of prime minister.
There has even been talk that, if voters like the budget, Mr Howard will call a snap election around July instead of waiting until November, as he has said he would.
Complaining of disarray among the Social Democrats and of the government's sharp U-turn over the European Union, the People's Party demanded a snap election, which will take place on September 28th.
The snap election announcement comes amid collapsing support for the two parties -- New Democracy and PASOK -- which have dominated Greek politics since the fall of the military junta in 1974.
But do they really want a snap election?
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It looks like there will be a snap election anyway because the government is running out of money and upon any bill to extend more borrowing, the opposition will refuse and the government has to fall.
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Their pledge to scrap inheritance tax for most households, so popular when it was unveiled in 2007 that it helped make Mr Brown retreat from a snap election he was about to call, now seems indulgent.
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