formed a small independent party, the Worker-Farmers Party (), espousing Maoism from 1948 until it rejoined the JSP in 1957. In 1955, the two splinter parties begrudgingly set aside their differences and re-merged. This was a "shotgun wedding" of sorts that happened under duress as it became increasingly clear that all of the conservative parties, with U.S. backing, were in the process of merging to form what would become the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), although the JSP actually merged a few months before the conservatives. The intra-party animosities did not fully subside, and the party remained riven by ideological factions organized according to left–right spectrum, as opposed to what the JSP called the "feudal personalism" of the more conservative party factions. Nevertheless, for a time the newly re-merged party found increasing success at the ballot box. Throughout the 1950s, the party made new gains in the Lower House in every single election, culminating in the 1958 Japanese general election, in which the party garnered an impressive 33.1 percent of the popular vote and 167 out of 467 seats. This was sufficient to block the attempts of conservative Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke to revise the Constitution of Japan in order to eliminate the anti-war "Peace Clause" in Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. By the end of the 1950s, a narrative emerged in the media that the Socialist Party would eventually gain a majority due to ongoing social trends such as increasing urbanization and industrialization. 1960s The party split again in 1960 because of internal disagreement over how to conduct the ongoing Anpo protests against revision of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between the United States and Japan, known as Anpo in Japanese, and whether or not to cooperate with the Communist Party of Japan in doing so. On 24 January 1960, the right-most elements of the party led by Suehiro Nishio (a part of the old Right Socialist Party of Japan), broke away to form the Democratic Socialist Party, leaving the JSP slightly weakened. A further blow came in the fall of 1960 when the energetic JSP party chairman Inejiro Asanuma was assassinated by a right-wing youth, Otoya Yamaguchi, during a televised election debate. Asanuma had been a charismatic figure who had been able to hold the antagonistic left and right factions of the party together through the force of his personality. Asanuma's untimely death deprived the party