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Yoshihide Suga, 71, one of Japan’s best-known and most respected politicians, will be the new Prime Minister of Japan. His appointment will take place in the coming days and will be a procedure: the contest to succeed Shinzo Abe, who announced his resignation for health reasons at the end of August, took place with the internal primaries of the Liberal Democrats, the party that leads the center-right government. Suga won the votes of 377 delegates, beating runner-up, former Foreign Minister Kishida Fumio, by nearly 300 votes.
In the thank you speech after the victory, Suga thanked Abe and offered him a bouquet of flowers, celebrating with him the result of the vote. the New York Times He stressed that Suga’s election shows that Japan remains a country where “stability matters more than ideology”, and in which Suga “has managed to establish himself in a ruling class tied to tradition and hostile to change.”
“I started from scratch as the son of a farmer in Akita,” says Suga. Get used to hearing this a lot. pic.twitter.com/kNUaYjFDmJ
– Gearoid Reidy (@GearoidReidy) September 14, 2020
The son of a strawberry grower and teacher, Suga has been in politics for more than thirty years, rising through the party hierarchy: in 1996 he entered Parliament, ten years later in government, and in 2012 he became the influential arm. Abe is right, assuming the post of secretary of government (that is, the minister who is tasked with coordinating the activities of his peers). After Abe’s resignation he was not considered among the main favorites, but he knew how to move well and obtain the support of almost all the factions of the party, although he does not openly belong to any of them.
“Suga represents a factor in the continuity of the Abe administration,” he told the Japan Times Daniel M. Smith, Japan expert who teaches comparative politics at Harvard: “At the same time, the contrast is stark, since unlike Abe, he does not come from a privileged family like many liberal Democratic politicians. Furthermore, for now he has avoided controversial statements and decisions that identify him as a right-wing nationalist.
Abe had carried out a series of liberalizations and promoted a broad grant of credit to boost consumption and increase inflation, particularly after the damage caused by the 2011 tsunami. For many critics, however, he has not done the right thing. Enough, despite the fact that Japan is the third largest economy in the world and the unemployment rate has dropped significantly: GDP growth is modest, the inflation rate has remained lower than planned and the country has a huge debt public. And the coronavirus pandemic has brought new problems, including the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics, for which Abe had spent a lot of money. According to several observers, the Abe government had already exhausted its driving force, and it was only a matter of time before it underwent a major shakeup (polls continue to give Liberal Democrats a huge advantage over other parties in the event of snap elections. ).
– Read also: Has Shinzo Abe improved the situation for women in Japan?
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