Last week, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced that he won’t be seeking a new term as president of the governing Liberal Democratic Party. He will step down from the post after his successor is picked in next month’s intra-party election, which is held every three years.
This is a significant development from Japan’s perspective, as it means Mr Kishida’s successor will almost immediately take over as the country’s next prime minister.
It would have been easy to imagine Mr Kishida remaining in power for a few more years – if only he had honed his political and communication skills as effectively as he had his policymaking chops. He is not having to step aside because he was a poor administrator – he wasn’t. Rather, it is because he was not ruthless enough as a politician.
The Prime Minister’s poor approval ratings in recent months rendered his position untenable. One poll last month revealed the public support for his administration hovered just above 15 per cent. LDP luminaries began to worry that, were Mr Kishida to stay on another term as their leader, the party would stand to lose a large number of seats – perhaps even its hold on power – in next year’s parliamentary election.
All of this, however, belies the important work that Mr Kishida has done since entering office nearly three years ago, from reopening the country after the Covid-19 pandemic to securing support for increased defence spending, to deepening Japan’s relationship with the US.
Mr Kishida also furthered ties with the UAE and other Gulf countries. And Tokyo was the lone outlier in the G7 on the Gaza war, as it condemned the Hamas attacks but also expressed concern over the number of casualties in the enclave at the hands of Israel’s army.
Mr Kishida adopted a muscular security policy in the wake of the Ukraine war, which continues to cause anxiety in Japan given the country’s own territorial disputes with Russia. His decision to seek rapprochement with South Korea, another country with which Japan shares disputes, proved as bold a move as his commitment to doubling defence spending in the face of a rising China and a more aggressive North Korea.
Military spending and improving relations with South Korea are touchy subjects in Japan due to Tokyo’s militarist past and controversial role in the Second World War. But the fact that neither decision drew opposition presented ample evidence that, in an evolving geopolitical order, Mr Kishida had the public’s support to shake up his country’s increasingly outdated post-war foreign and defence policies.
The Prime Minister succeeded in inviting TSMC, Taiwan’s largest semiconductor manufacturing company, to start operations in Japan. He oversaw stocks surpassing highs of the late 1980s. As Bloomberg’s Gearoid Reidy wrote, his pick for Bank of Japan governor, Kazuo Ueda, “had begun to steer the nation out of years of abnormal monetary policy without causing chaos”.
And as Reuters reported, he “eschewed corporate profit-driven trickle-down economics in favour of policies aimed at boosting household incomes, including wage hikes and promoting share ownership”. Indeed, it is to his government’s credit that real wages finally began to rise in June, for the first time in more than two years.
Of course, Mr Kishida also made mistakes. His redistributive “New Capitalism” economic policy failed to take off. His government faced a strong backlash for even considering the idea of raising taxes, even though in the end no significant rise was ever announced.
But undoubtedly, his biggest shortcoming – and the reason for his anaemic ratings – was his inability to clean up the mess left behind by fellow party members in the aftermath of two of the biggest scandals to rock Japan in recent decades.
One was the association several LDP members had with the Unification Church, a controversial South Korean-based religious movement that allegedly received preferential treatment in exchange for political donations. The controversy had long simmered on the fringes of Japanese politics but only came to the fore in the summer of 2022, after the assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe by an unemployed former soldier who claimed that his family had been left destitute by the donations his mother made to the church. The soldier, who is on trial, blamed Mr Abe.
Several members of the LDP resigned over the scandal. And while Mr Kishida was not himself involved with the church, he became a primary target for the public’s discontent. To his discredit, he didn’t appear to be doing much, beyond making a few remarks to create the accountability that was required to repair the damage done to the LDP brand.
The second controversy was a funding scandal that emerged late last year, in which major factions within the LDP were alleged to have broken the law by failing to report hundreds of millions of yen raised from selling tickets to fundraising events while allocating the missing money to dozens of legislators as kickbacks.
Here, too, Mr Kishida was not personally implicated. But his attempt at damage control through a few dismissals and a pledge to clean up the party did little to assuage a decidedly disenchanted electorate.
The immediate fallout of all this has been a string of byelection defeats for the LDP.
In a previous column, I had noted that the political legacies of Mr Abe and Mr Kishida were more intrinsically linked than was apparent. Not only did Mr Kishida serve as foreign minister during Mr Abe’s record-breaking tenure as prime minister, but he had also resolved to complete the task of fundamentally overhauling Japan’s post-war foreign policy and security architecture once he got the top job.
But the article had also carried a warning for the Prime Minister, who at the time was already having to deal with the mess created during the Abe premiership. Two years later, he is having to own the same problems – corruption and a lack of accountability – at a time when people are getting increasingly disillusioned with politics.
This is the failure of Mr Kishida the politician, for which he will pay by stepping down. The question then is, when the Japanese eventually look back on his time in office, were the achievements of Mr Kishida the administrator good enough to outshine his political errors and define his legacy?
