Shigeru Ishiba as prime minister on Sunday evening, after the ruling coalition he led lost majorities in both houses of parliament.
The move came ahead of a vote by his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that was planned for Monday that would almost certainly have forced him out of office.
Ishiba is to some extent leaving office on his own terms, and can claim success in his primary aim of concluding an .
“Now that negotiations on US tariff measures have reached a conclusion, I believe this is the appropriate moment,” he said Sunday.
But his departure and the next four weeks of campaigning by candidates hoping to take his place will inevitably lead to greater political uncertainty at a time when Japan faces major challenges at home and abroad.
“Stagnation in politics means that very little can be done on issues that affect ordinary people, such as rising prices, a worsening cost of living crisis, wage concerns and national security,” said Hiromi Murakami, a professor of political science at the Tokyo campus of Temple University.
“People want real solutions to the real problems they are facing and I think the public is deeply disappointed by another leader who has only been in office for less than a year and now we have to start all over again,” she told DW.
Leadership race heats up ahead of October election
Ishiba will stay on until the LDP’s next leader is elected. That person will also hold the post of prime minister at the head of a minority government that needs to compromise with other parties to make any legislative headway.
The leadership vote is expected to take place in early October. A number of names have already been put forward as likely challengers.
Just days before Ishiba’s resignation, a poll identified the two most likely challengers: former economic security minister, nationalist Sanae Takaichi, was favored by around 23% of the public, while the more centrist Shinjiro Koizumi was at around 20.9%.
. Having been ahead after the first round of voting, she was ultimately defeated because a majority of LDP members were concerned about her right-wing positions on a number of key issues.
But given the , Takaichi’s nationalist stance and hawkish views of China might no longer be considered so problematic.
The party was defeated in the July general election, primarily losing seats to right-wing, nationalist parties such as the Japan Conservative Party and Sanseito, which are both resolutely opposed to immigration, want foreign nationals to be banned from owning property in Japan and are calling for a dramatic increase in defense spending to fend off growing security challenges posed by China, North Korea and Russia.
Other policies they favor include greater support for the imperial family, resistance to more rights for the nation’s LGBTQ+ community and maintaining the ban on women retaining their maiden name after marriage.
Who are Japan’s leading contenders for prime minister?
Both Takaichi and Koizumi face serious challenges to becoming prime minister, according to Stephen Nagy, a professor of international relations at Tokyo’s International Christian University.
“Koizumi is very articulate, he’s smart and he’s the son of Junichiro Koizumi, who was a hugely popular prime minister for six years from 2001,” he told DW. “But he is young — he is only 44 — and he has limited experience. And I wonder whether some of the 80-something elders who still have so much influence over the LDP share his world view.”
Takaichi, on the other hand, is experienced and is seen as the late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s protege, Nagy pointed out. She has led the party’s policy council and has served in Cabinet. Her appointment would also make her the country’s first ever female prime minister.
But “a lot of her core values — her opposition to same-sex marriage, her position on maiden names after marriage — do not resonate with ordinary voters.”
Other candidates might also step forward, including Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi and Taro Kono, who is viewed as something of a maverick within the LDP.
Nagy predicts that Japan will return to the instability of the period that followed Junichiro Koizumi’s premiership, when the country had six prime ministers in six years.
“I think Japan is going to return to rotating prime ministers, each lasting a year or so, for the next five or six years until a leader emerges who can really pull the party together again,” he said.
A chance for a national reset?
The LDP has traditionally been a broad union of center-right political leanings. Despite the challenge posed by an increasingly vocal right-wing movement, Nagy still believes that the party will be able to avoid the sort of collapse that has seen other Japanese parties disintegrate and reform under different names and tweaked policies.
Murakami disagrees, however. She says that a party that has dominated Japanese politics since it was formed in 1955 might finally have reached the end of the road.
“There are big gaps between the far-right wing of the party and the centrists, and those gaps are widening,” she said. “And that makes it difficult for the party itself to reach consensus on policies and areas of priority, let alone work with other parties in an alliance.”
But in a crisis there is opportunity, Murakami points out.
“Maybe this is finally the opportunity for the LDP and people in general to have serious discussions about the best way forward for Japan,” she added.
“This could be our chance for a national reset.”
Edited by: Karl Sexton
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