Shigeru Ishiba, a 67-year-old political veteran and advocate of a kind of Asian NATO in the face of what he sees as the threat from China and North Korea, has won the race to become Japan’s next prime minister. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) elected him this Friday as its next president, in one of the most unpredictable leadership contests in recent decades, in which up to nine candidates have competed. Ishiba will replace the current prime minister, Fumio Kishida, as head of the conservative organization, who resigned in August from his re-election as party leader and, therefore, decided to leave the Government. It is taken for granted that Ishiba will take the reins of the Executive of the fourth largest economy on the planet next Tuesday, October 1, when Kishida formalizes his resignation, and Parliament, controlled by the PLD with the help of a minority party, ratifies its support.
In his fifth attempt to take over the reins of the party, this former (fugitive) bank worker, former head of several ministerial portfolios, including Defense, and former general secretary of the PLD, has managed to prevail in the second round of voting over Sanae Takaichi, current Minister of Economic Security and representative of the hard wing of the party. Takaichi, who lost by 194 votes to Ishiba’s 215, is one breath away from becoming the first woman to head the Japanese Government. Ishiba, sidelined by the outgoing prime minister, who came to power in 2021, had become a dissident voice within the party.
“I believe in the people and I will tell the truth with courage and sincerity. “I will do everything possible to make Japan a safe country again, a place where everyone can live with a smile,” Ishiba said in a brief speech to his party’s legislators after the result, according to the public media outlet. Japanese NHK.
The new leader faces the challenge of renewing a party marred by the corruption scandal that led to the resignation in August of Kishida, whose popularity had plummeted. Ishiba will try to restore public confidence ahead of national elections, scheduled for 2025, at a time when economic growth in Japan is still sputtering. The Central Bank operates for the first time in years in an environment of positive interest rates, the cost of living is rising, the debt is skyrocketing and the region continues in a tense geopolitical situation.
Popular among local and rural leaders of his party, Ishiba also inherits a Japan in the process of reviewing its military policy, traditionally considered pacifist. Under Kishida’s mandate, Tokyo has experienced a rapprochement with its main ally, the United States, and has announced Japan’s greatest military strengthening since World War II, justified by the “increased security risks from China and “Russia, and North Korea’s nuclear development.” Kishida, who shone last year as host of the G-7, has popularized the phrase: “Ukraine now could be East Asia tomorrow.”
Ishiba has leaned in favor of strengthening the Armed Forces and a constitutional reform that makes it clear that the country has self-defense forces, analyzed this Wednesday Ko Maeda, associate professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas and editor of Japanese Journal of Political Science, in an online chat with correspondents.
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Long-time legislator, the most likely next premiere He was first elected to parliament in 1986. He was 29 years old, making him the youngest member of the National Diet (Parliament) at the time. The newly elected LDP chief has promised to move some ministries and government agencies out of Tokyo to help revive Japan’s moribund regions, and has proposed creating an agency to oversee the construction of emergency shelters across disaster-prone Japan. disasters.
While Ishiba has been cornered by Kishida, he has rebelled against policies involving greater use of nuclear energy and criticized his party for not allowing married couples to use separate surnames. The latter is a decades-old debate that marks a still quite sexist society where the vast majority of women continue to take their husband’s last name. “I consider this to be my last battle,” he said last month when launching his campaign at a Shinto shrine in rural Tottori prefecture, Reuters reported. It was here that his father was governor and where Ishiba began his political career at the height of Japan’s bubbling, fast-growing economy in the 1980s.
The most likely thing, analyst Ko Maeda considered before knowing the result, is that the newly elected will choose to call almost immediate elections, bringing them forward almost a year (they were scheduled for autumn 2025), to take advantage of the momentum of these weeks. “Normally, when the LDP elects a new leader, popularity usually rises. So it’s a good time to do it,” he said.
Under Japan’s electoral system, voters elect members of the House of Representatives (the lower house), and the party that wins the majority of seats is responsible for nominating the prime minister, who is later formally appointed by the National Diet (Parliament). The LDP has maintained parliamentary control virtually uninterrupted since its founding in 1955, and has governed the country since then with only two brief interruptions, between 1993 and 1994 and from 2009 to 2012.
