Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba had vowed to “restore the smiles” to a nation suffering under economic, demographic and geopolitical strains when he took office.
But faced with the challenge of an unpredictable US president and a rising populist challenge at home, that ambition went unrealised. Ishiba announced his resignation on Sunday following a surge in living costs and two disastrous election setbacks in just 10 months.
“I don’t think he did anything that would be memorable for ordinary Japanese, let alone something worth smiling about,” said Koichi Nakano, a political scientist at Sophia University.
On the face of it, Ishiba’s brief tenure fits a familiar pattern. Japan has had 18 prime ministers since 1990, of whom 11 have lasted roughly one year.
But while those departures mostly reflected sinking approval ratings, scandal and the conduct of the individual leader, Ishiba’s is indicative of a more fundamental challenge for the Liberal Democratic party, which has ruled Japan for most of the past 70 years but now finds itself struggling for relevance.
Its ability to reconcile tensions within its ranks is waning, with a rift emerging between a moderate centre-right wing associated with reform and a conservative element that takes a revisionist view of history and whose rhetoric occasionally strays into xenophobia.
Ishiba’s announcement — which pre-empted a party vote of no confidence — fires the starting gun on the race to find a leader charismatic enough to reconnect with voters and able to rebuild the internal coalition that has been a pillar of the LDP’s resilience. The price of failure, the outgoing leader warned, would be high.
“If the LDP loses credibility, Japanese politics will fall to casual populism,” Ishiba warned on Sunday night. “If the public sees us as the same old party, and as if nothing has changed, it will have no future.”
In addition to the need to heal internal party divisions, Ishiba’s successor will have to contend with formidable external challenges. Chief among them will be navigating the presidency of Donald Trump and maintaining Japan’s status as America’s closest Asian ally.
“Ishiba was not someone who was able to offer either Washington or his own country a deep vision of Japan’s role in the world,” said Kenneth Weinstein, Japan chair at the Hudson Institute think-tank in Washington. “Japan needs someone who can deal face to face with Trump and inspire Japan to believe in itself.”
The new leader will also need to invigorate an economy suffering from labour shortages and an ageing population.
The election, which will be held in the first week of October, is expected to draw a large number of contenders.
The winner will need to navigate Japan’s challenges with a weakened hand in both houses of parliament, over which, on Ishiba’s watch, the LDP lost outright control. That will require working not only with the party’s long-term coalition partner, Komeito, but with at least one smaller opposition party.
Frontrunners, according to party members, include Shinjiro Koizumi, the 44-year-old agriculture minister seen as a relative moderate and deemed the most capable of making deals with the Japan Innovation party, the third-largest in the lower house.
Koizumi is likely to be challenged by, among others, Sanae Takaichi, a hardline conservative seen by supporters as the only figure able to claw back voters who defected to smaller rightwing parties — and who would be Japan’s first-ever female prime minister.
The extent of the new LDP leader’s task will be made clear immediately, said Mieko Nakabayashi, a political scientist at Waseda University. In the past, the party’s control of parliament assured its leader of elevation to prime minister. Now, even when a winner emerges from the party vote, it will need to win over smaller parties to put its candidate into office.
“There is no guarantee . . . so they have to choose a leader that they are absolutely sure can get over that first hurdle,” said Nakabayashi.
More broadly, she added, the party’s traditional pitch of uniting moderates and conservatives to appeal to a broad spectrum of voters as the safest option was wearing thin.
The reflationary “Abenomics” agenda that temporarily revived the party under the late Shinzo Abe has run its course. Nimbler populists from the Japan Innovation party, Democratic party for the People and Sanseito have wielded social media to bleed younger voters from the LDP.
Those issues came to a head in July, when the LDP lost its majority in the upper house of parliament, following its loss of the lower house in October last year.
Ishiba had been under pressure to vacate the premiership for months, but had vowed to remain in place until trade talks with the US were concluded. The two sides signed a memorandum of understanding on Thursday. His announcement also pre-empted a poll of LDP representatives on Monday that was expected to force an immediate party leadership election.
The party’s internal postmortem published last week refrained from blaming Ishiba, or previous party scandals, said Tobias Harris, a political analyst at Foresight Japan.
“What we got instead was a serious report on why LDP support has been falling. And it was damning,” said Harris. “It showed a party out of touch with the public.
“The extent to which the LDP is in real trouble is absolutely clear this time,” he added.
The party’s strongest periods have been under charismatic leaders who injected a mood of dynamism, rather than offer specific policy proscriptions, Harris said.
The Japanese public, he added, was willing to forgive mis-steps if leaders were seen to be doing something. “The unforgivable sin of Ishiba was that he allowed himself to be trapped by inaction,” said Harris.
