LDP picks Shigeru Ishiba to be Japan's next prime minister

Japan’s former defence minister Shigeru Ishiba is all set to be the country’s next Prime Minister after the ruling Liberal Democratic Party chose the veteran politician for the party leadership. A record nine candidates were vying for the top position in the election which took place on Friday.

According to The Straits Time, the 67-year-old beat economic security minister Sanae Takaichi, 63, in a run-off vote after LDP failed to produce a clear winner in the first round of the contest. Ishiba, who managed to succeed in his fifth bid, will be sworn in as Japan’s 102nd Prime Minister by the Diet on October 1.

The contest ensued after Japan’s current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced that he would step down from the prime ministerial post. It is pertinent to note that since LDP is a dominant party in both chambers, the leader of the party by default becomes the Japanese premier.

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An intense battle 

Ishiba managed to garner 215 votes cast by lawmakers and prefecture chapters while Takaichi got 194 votes. In the first round of voting LDP’s 368 lawmakers, each cast a vote, with the other half proportionally allocated among 1.1 million rank-and-file members across 47 prefectural chapters.

Interestingly, Takaichi, who ran against Kishida in the 2021 party presidential election, came up at the top in the first round of voting winning 72 lawmaker votes and 109 rank-and-file votes for a total of 181 votes. In the first round, Ishiba was in second place with 46 lawmaker votes and 108 rank-and-file votes for a total of 154 votes.

LDP turns a new page

The Japanese ruling party is eyeing to turn a new page through this leadership election as it seeks to regain public trust. The party which has been in power the most after World War 2 has been marred by high-profile scandals. The first hit came after there were revelations of LDP’s cozy ties with the controversial Unification Church which has been branded as a cult in some countries.

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Following this, a massive slush fund scandal managed to implicate nearly one in five LDP lawmakers. Hence, the winner now has the challenge to clean up the party image, bridge divisions that have surfaced in the hustings and regain public trust.

Ishiba also has an imminent national election to deal with as he will have to work to earn a strong public mandate. A snap election for the Lower House is likely to be held within 2024 – well ahead of the expiry of lawmaker terms in October 2025 – while the fixed-term Upper House must go to a vote in July 2025.

Considered a defence policy expert, Ishiba has proposed an Asian version of the NATO military alliance and a more equal Japan-US security alliance. He is also an ardent supporter of Taiwan’s democracy. This is interesting since the party is focusing on an urgent task to write the military Self-Defence Forces into the war-renouncing Article 9 the United States-drafted supreme law, which has not been revised since its enactment in 1947.

Ishiba will now be facing the new Leader of the Opposition as the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan elected its leader, the centrist former prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, on September 23.

With inputs from agencies.