Japan: Hiroshima-born Fumio Kishida to be next PM on Oct 4; polls in November
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Hiroshima-born Fumio Kishida will be Japan’s next Prime Minister, succeeding incumbent Yoshihide Suga who quickly lost support within the ruling party within a year in office.
The ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) on Wednesday anointed Kishida, 64, a former foreign minister, as its next leader, media reported. He has been made the new leader tasked to face the general election due in November.
Two female contenders, Sanae Takaichi, 60, and Seiko Noda, 61, dropped out after the first round.
Although Kishida enjoys only moderate popular support, with support from some of the party’s heavyweights, he successfully checked the rising star Taro Kono, the maverick minister in charge of the coronavirus vaccine roll-out, in the tracks.
“We will strive to achieve economic growth and distribution of wealth”, he told reporters, adding there was no way to achieve growth without distributing wealth. This, ironically, echoes what Chinese Prime Minister Xi Jinping has also said about “common prosperity”, asking billionaires to share their wealth.
Kishida succeeds unpopular PM Yoshihide Suga who did not seek re-election as party leader after just one year in office. The new leader is expected to become premier at a parliamentary session on Monday because of the LDP’s majority in the lower house. Next, he will form a new cabinet and reshuffle the LDP executive in early October.
Reports said the House of Representatives, the Lower House of Parliament, is likely to be dissolved in mid-October with an election slated for either November 7 or November 14.
Kishida is expected to take the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) proceedings to the next level as he shares the need to boost Japan’s defenses and strengthen security ties with the US, Australia, and India while preserving vital economic ties with China.
He has proposed a spending package of more than 30 trillion yen, adding that Japan likely would not raise a sales tax rate from 10 percent “for about a decade”.
Kishida, the self-effacing former banker from Hiroshima, has promised tens of trillions of yen in spending and pledged to steer away from “neoliberal” economic policies in a bid to bolster the middle class.
The LDP, which has been in power in Japan for all but about four years since 1955, will use its majority in parliament to formally install Kishida as the PM. He will have to hit the ground running as general elections are due in November.
In his career as a diplomat, the Hiroshima-born Kishida has long been seen as a dove on foreign policy for his opposition to nuclear weapons and efforts to resolve a painful decades-old dispute over Japan’s past militarism in the Korean Peninsula. But he showed a harder edge in his campaign for the leadership as he expressed the need to deal “firmly” with the stability of the Taiwan Strait and said that Japan’s defense spending will probably continue to rise.
He will be tasked with figuring out how to tackle sour relations with China, the country’s biggest trading partner, without distancing Japan from its only military ally, the US.
The outgoing PM Suga, who abandoned a plan to run for re-election after his support rates plummeted to record lows amid criticism of his shoddy handling of the pandemic, was seen as a liability for his party heading into the election expected soon.
