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TOKYO — With the world’s oldest population, rapidly declining births, gargantuan
public debt and increasingly damaging natural disasters fueled by climate change,
Japan faces deep-rooted challenges that the longstanding governing party has failed
to tackle.
Yet in choosing a new prime minister on Wednesday, the Liberal Democratic Party
elected the candidate least likely to offer bold solutions.
The party’s elite power
okers chose Fumio Kishida, 64, a stalwart moderate, in a
unoff election for the leadership, seeming to disregard the public’s preference for a
maverick challenger. In doing so, they anointed a politician with little to distinguish
him from the unpopular departing leader, Yoshihide Suga, or his predecessor, Shinzo
Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister.
Elders in the party, which has had a near monopoly on power in the decades since
World War II, made their choice confident that, with a weak political opposition and
low voter turnout, they would face little chance of losing a general election later this
year. So, largely insulated from voter pressure, they opted for a predictable forme
foreign minister who has learned to control any impulse to stray from the mainstream
party platform.
“In a sense, you are ignoring the voice of the rank and file in order to get somebody
the party bosses are more comfortable with,” said Jeff Kingston, the director of Asian
studies at Temple University in Tokyo.
But choosing a leader who lacks popular support ca
ies the risk of a backlash that
leaves the party weaker after the election and makes Mr. Kishida’s job harder as the
country slowly emerges from six months of pandemic restrictions that have battered
the economy.
Mr. Kishida will need to win the public’s trust to show that he is not just a party
insider, said Kristi Govella, the deputy director of the Asia Program at the German
Marshall Fund of the United States.
“If challenges start to arise,” she said, “we could see his approval ratings decrease
very quickly because he is starting from a point of relatively modest support.”
Mr. Kishida was one of four candidates who vied for the leadership post in an
unusually close race that went to a runoff between him and Taro Kono, an outspoken
nonconformist whose common touch has made him popular with the public and with
ank-and-file party members. Mr. Kishida prevailed in the second round of voting, in
which ballots cast by members of Parliament held greater weight than ballots cast by
other party members.
He will become prime minister when Parliament holds a special session next week,
and will then lead the party into the general election, which must be held by
November.
In his victory speech on Wednesday, Mr. Kishida acknowledged the challenges he
faces. “We have mountains of important issues that lie ahead in Japan’s future,” he
said.
They loom both at home and a
oad. Mr. Kishida faces mounting tensions in the
egion as China has grown increasingly aggressive and North Korea has started
testing ballistic missiles again. Taiwan is seeking membership in a multilateral trade
pact that Japan helped negotiate, and Mr. Kishida may have to help finesse a
decision on how to accept the self-governed island into the group without angering
China.
As a former foreign minister, Mr. Kishida may have an easier time managing his
international portfolio. Most analysts expect that he will maintain a strong relationship
with the United States and continue to build on alliances with Australia and India to
create a bulwark against China.
But on the domestic front, he is mostly offering a continuation of Mr. Abe’s economic
policies, which have failed to cure the country’s stagnation. Income inequality is
ising as fewer workers benefit from Japan’s vaunted system of lifetime employment
— a reality reflected in Mr. Kishida’s campaign promise of a “new capitalism” that
encourages companies to share more profits with middle-class workers.
“Japan’s accumulated debt is growing, and the gap between rich and poor is
growing,” said Tsuneo Watanabe, a senior fellow at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation
in Tokyo. “I don’t think even a genius can tackle this.”
On the pandemic, Mr. Kishida may initially escape some of the pressures that felled
Mr. Suga, as the vaccine rollout has gathered momentum and close to 60 percent of
the public is now inoculated. But Mr. Kishida has offered few concrete policies to
address other issues like aging, population decline or climate change.
In a magazine questionnaire, he said that he needed “scientific verification” that
human activities were causing global warming, saying, “I think that’s the case to
some extent.”
Given the enduring power of the right flank of the Liberal Democratic Party, despite
its minority standing in the party, Mr. Kishida closed what daylight he had with these
power
okers during the campaign.
He had previously gained a reputation as being more dovish than the influential right
wing led by Mr. Abe, but during the leadership race, he expressed a hawkish stance
toward China. As a parliamentary representative from Hiroshima, Mr. Kishida has
opposed nuclear weapons, but he has made clear his support for restarting Japan’s
nuclear power plants, which have been idled since the triple meltdown in Fukushima
10 years ago.
And he toned down his support for overhauling a law requiring ma
ied couples to
share a surname for legal purposes and declared that he would not endorse
same-sex ma
iage, going against public sentiment but hewing to the views of the
party’s conservative elite.
“I think Kishida knows how he won, and it was not by appealing to the general public,
it was not by running as a liberal, but courting support to his right,” said Tobias
Ha
is, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington. “So what
that’s going to mean for the composition of his cabinet and his priorities, and what
his party’s platform ends up looking like, means he could end up being pulled in a
few different directions.”
In many respects, Wednesday’s election represented a referendum on the lasting
clout of Mr. Abe, who resigned last fall because of ill health. He had led the party fo
eight consecutive years, a remarkable stint given Japan’s history of revolving-doo
prime ministers. When he stepped down, the party chose Mr. Suga, who had served
as Mr. Abe’s chief cabinet secretary, to extend his boss’s legacy.
But over the past year, the public grew increasingly disillusioned with Mr. Suga, who
lacked charisma and failed to connect with average voters. Although Mr. Abe backed
Sanae Takaichi — a hard-line conservative who was seeking to become Japan’s first
female prime minister — to revitalize his base in the party’s far right, analysts and
other lawmakers said he helped steer support to Mr. Kishida in the runoff.
As a result, Mr. Kishida may end up beholden to his predecessor.
“Kishida cannot go against what Abe wants,” said Shigeru Ishiba, a former defense
minister who challenged Mr. Abe for the party leadership twice and withdrew from
unning in the leadership election this month to support Mr. Kono.
“I am not sure I would use the word ‘puppet,’ but maybe he is a puppet?” Mr. Ishiba
added. “What is clear is he depends on Abe’s influence.”
During the campaign for the party leadership, Mr. Kishida appeared to acknowledge
some dissatisfaction with the Abe era with his talk of a “new capitalism.” In doing so,
he followed a familiar template within the Liberal Democratic Party, which has been
adept at adopting policies first introduced by the opposition in order to keep voters
assuaged.
“That’s one of the reasons why they have maintained such longevity as a party,” said
Saori N. Katada, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern
California. “Kishida is definitely taking that card and running with it.”