Japan’s New Leader Is Scrambling to Stem the Electoral Bleeding

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba was supposed to be a fresh face. He could quickly end up being a forgotten one. 

Weeks into his premiership and mere days out from a general election, red alert signals are sounding in Tokyo’s corridors of power. After his surprise victory in last month’s leadership race for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, Ishiba has spectacularly failed to achieve even the “new manager bounce” in public opinion polls that generally accompanies a change at the top. His Cabinet has been greeted with the lowest support figures of any new prime minister this century. More respondents to a Jiji poll said they disapproved of the premier than supported him. 

Worse still, the roll of the dice to call a hasty snap election now looks like it may backfire. News front pages warn of a potential trouncing at the ballot box this Sunday. The LDP is likely to lose its majority in the lower house and may also struggle to hold on to power with its long-standing coalition partner Komeito. Not only would that fall below Ishiba’s own definition of victory, it would necessitate expanding the coalition further, leading to more compromise and slowing decision-making. And as polling data continues to worsen as election day approaches, the prospect of an LDP loss — and a subsequent change in government for the first time in over a decade — still seems quite distant but is no longer unthinkable.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The whole point of last month’s ruling-party election was to find a leader who could reinvigorate the LDP after the slush-fund scandal that brought its support to historic lows. Despite his limited support within the party, Ishiba has long been seen as popular with the public, a glad-handing man of the people, regularly topping surveys as the most suitable choice for the next chief. 

Instead, as I had long suspected, it seems that Ishiba’s popularity has more to do with who he isn’t. In effective opposition within the ruling party, frequently at loggerheads with the late leader Shinzo Abe, he represented change and a blank slate onto which Abe opponents could project their political desires. Now that he’s in the big seat, people are having to look closer at what he actually stands for. 

So far, that’s been uninspiring at best. At a time of scandal, the premier is clean — but that’s not good enough. Like other incumbent parties across the world this year, he’s dealing with some issues not of his own making, notably inflation. But he’s already flip-flopping, backing away from past support for everything from an “Asian NATO” and Bank of Japan rate hikes, to greater representation for women in government and support for same-sex marriage.

In the absence of his own alternatives, Ishiba has unwisely inherited many of predecessor Fumio Kishida’s domestic slogans and policies. His fudge on lawmakers implicated in the funding scandal — withdrawing the whip while hinting they might be accepted back into the party if they win reelection — hasn’t gone down well with a public that wants offenders punished. And in overplaying his hand in the early days of his administration, turning his back on Taro Aso and the former Abe faction most heavily implicated in the scandal, he has alienated many conservatives and painted a target on his back. Aso has reportedly told Sanae Takaichi, who Ishiba defeated in last month’s race, to be ready for another challenge. Say what you will of Takaichi, but there’s little questioning where she stands, and would quickly tilt the country rightward. 

The premier has failed to quell the feeling around the country of a public that wants to give the LDP a bloody nose. Already, people are searching for the right historical comparison. Is it Yoshiro Mori, who took over in unexpected circumstances in 2000 and oversaw a trouncing that ultimately resulted in his premiership lasting just a year? Or Aso himself, who led the party to electoral disaster in 2009 and ushered in a change of government? With an upper house election coming next summer, a poor night for the prime minister could quickly see him become a lame duck; a bad showing could be even worse. In that scenario, perhaps the correct comparison might predate the LDP itself: Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni, the first postwar prime minister, who served just 54 days in office. 

Of course, it might not come to that. Polling, in Japan as elsewhere, has often proved unreliable, and the anti-LDP sentiment might not materialize on Sunday. While the newly elected head of the largest opposition party, Yoshihiko Noda, is likely to enjoy a large increase in seats, Ishiba is lucky that Noda doesn’t represent much of a break with the past either. He’s still remembered as the last prime minister of the disastrous Democratic Party of Japan and will struggle to energize the electorate to show up on voting day .

The sudden dissolution of parliament also gave Noda no chance to coordinate a strategic alliance with other parties and means the anti-LDP vote will be split in many districts. The two leaders sound and even look quite alike, and indeed were both members of the short-lived New Frontier Party in the mid-1990s. But even assuming he somehow engineers a better-than-expected showing on Sunday, Ishiba will need more than luck if he’s to survive. 

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Gearoid Reidy is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Japan and the Koreas. He previously led the breaking news team in North Asia, and was the Tokyo deputy bureau chief.

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