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Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, has announced that he will participate in the ruling party’s race to succeed Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Suga, a longtime aide to the outgoing prime minister, told reporters on Wednesday that he was participating in the leadership race to avoid a political vacuum at a time of crisis.
“I decided to run in the race for the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party after deeply reflecting on what I can do as a politician and a member of the Abe administration,” Suga said.
The party leader will take over as prime minister given the majority of the PLD in the lower house of parliament. Abe announced his decision to resign last week, citing poor health.
Suga’s main competitors in the party’s Sept. 14 vote are former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida, but Suga’s position seems solid.
The party decided Tuesday to hold a reduced leadership vote that will not include rank-and-file members. Instead, only its legislators and three representatives from each of the country’s 47 prefectures will vote, an advantage for Suga, 71, who has the backing of five of the seven factions of the PLD, according to local media.
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Ishiba, 63, is not seen as popular among LDP lawmakers due to his anti-Abe stance, but he is a favorite in public opinion polls. Kishida, 63, was once considered Abe’s favorite successor. But the prime minister has said he will not endorse a candidate, and Kishida’s limited public profile is likely to leave him struggling to challenge Suga.
‘Boost Abenomics’
Many chapters of the party will poll rank-and-file members to decide how to allocate their three votes, but experts say this is unlikely to change the momentum that is building for Suga if members of all five factions back him.
His selection “is increasingly assured, as the LDP factions – with the exception of the factions led by rival candidates Shigeru Ishiba and Fumio Kishida – have lined up behind Suga,” said Tobias Harris, an expert on Japan from the consulting firm Teneo, in a note.
In his press conference, Suga said that he will “maintain and push forward” the reflationary “Abenomics” stimulus policies pursued by the outgoing prime minister.
The son of a strawberry grower in northern Akita prefecture, Suga is a self-made politician, a rarity in Japan’s largely hereditary business of politics. He earned his own tuition while working various part-time jobs to graduate from a university in Tokyo. He entered politics as a lawmaker’s secretary for 11 years and served as a municipal assemblyman for nearly nine years before being elected to parliament in 1994.
As Japan’s longest-serving chief cabinet secretary, Suga is a policy coordinator and adviser to Abe, the point man behind the centralized power of the Prime Minister’s Office influencing bureaucrats to implement policies. Suga has been a loyal supporter of Abe since his first term as prime minister from 2006 to 2007, which ended abruptly due to Abe’s chronic illness, and helped him return to power in 2012.
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It has built a reputation for its televised briefings for the media twice a day. He is known as “Uncle Reiwa” after he was tasked with revealing the name of the new imperial era for Emperor Naruhito last year.
When asked about the key policies a post-Abe government should address, Suga noted that anti-coronavirus measures are the biggest challenge. The Japan-US security alliance, developed through the friendship between Abe and US President Donald Trump, “needs to be further deepened” within the limitations of Japan’s pacifist constitution, he said.
The other two contenders, Kishida and Ishiba, said Abe’s policies tended to ignore the voices of ordinary people and were intended to address the economic and social divisions that had widened under Abe. Neither has proposed major changes in Japan’s diplomatic and security policies.
The next prime minister will end the remainder of Abe’s term, until September 2021. There are no female contenders.
Abe’s successor will also have to deal with the Tokyo Olympics that have been postponed to next summer, setting Japan’s security policy in the face of an increasingly assertive China and the outcome of the US presidential elections. , Japan’s key ally.
