Kishida moves away, leaves challenges for successor

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida had announced at a press conference on Tuesday that he would not contest for the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in September. And he was thereby announcing that he would step down as prime minister as well because the president of the party is also the prime minister of the country. He made the pregnant remark at the press conference: “Politics cannot function without public trust.”

Kishida has had low popularity ratings for a prime minister. The inference of political observers is that he is quitting because of his growing unpopularity. He also said, “I made this heavy decision thinking of the public, with the strong will to push political reform forward.” The LDP, which has been the ruling party in Japan since the American-framed constitution came into existence in 1955, has been the bastion of conservatism and pragmatism, and over the years of internal feuds and corruption. But it has survived, and Japan is yet to develop a strong alternative party.

The ruling party and the country both face huge challenges, and it would appear that Kishida’s political credibility has been dented by both. The LDP has been scarred by its connection with South Korea’s Unification Church, an influential organisation and the LDP leaders had been contributing to it for many years. A reason cited by the assailant of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was the connection with Unification Church. The party has not yet made clear the ties with the church group. The second issue has been that of the slush funds that came to light in the contributions to the party. Japan has been facing many economic and social problems. For decades now, the Japanese economy has been in a no-growth mode if not recession, and the Bank of Japan (BoJ) had maintained the interest rates in the negative territory in the hope of providing stimulation to the economy. But it remained ineffective.

One of the decisions taken during Kishida’s time is to raise the interest rates for the first time in years because the economy seemed to have revived. But there has been unrest among the people because of the cost of living crisis, something that has been plaguing advanced economies in Europe and in Japan in the post-Covid-19 years of 2022 and 2023. Kishida had also faced criticism as the Olympics were held in Tokyo in 2021, instead of 2020 because of the pandemic.

Kishidas’ time in office which had started in 2021 saw signficiant changes in Japan’s foreign policy bearings. Under American pressure, the country had to enter into bilateral parleys with South Korea, which carries the negative legacy of the pre-World War Two Japanese colonialism in the Korean peninsula.

Japan had also become part of the new grouping, the Quad, which includes the United States, Australia and India as well, a formation to counter the growing strategic presence of China in the China Sea as well as in the South-East Asian region. Kishida had also upped the defence spending of the country, a move away from the pacifist constitutional position in the post-World War Two period.

The challenges that the LDP and Japan face are both existential and strategic. Surprisingly, though there are many claimants to the leadership position, no one has a stated position or vision as to where the party and the country should go. The LDP has functioned as a club of power-seekers who made compromises to keep things in place in the party. So, Kishida’s exit could mean a leadership vacuum of sorts. The new president of the party to be elected in September will step into this vacuum and he or she has an uphill task of leading the party and the country out of troubled waters.