Japan PM Kishida, once a safe pair of hands, fumbles top job

Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida telling a press conference in Tokyo on August 14, 2024 that he will not seek re-election as head of his party next month, meaning the end of his premiership – Copyright POOL/AFP Philip FONG

Hiroshi HIYAMA, Natsuko FUKUE

Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was seen as a safe pair of hands when his party installed him three years ago, but he soon became a liability as scandals and inflation eroded his popularity. 

Kishida, 67, will step down next month after announcing on Wednesday he was pulling out of a contest for leadership of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and ahead of a general election scheduled by October next year.

A father-of-three and keen baseball fan, Kishida is the scion of a Hiroshima political family and has a low-key presence sometimes taken for a lack of charisma.

Taking office in 2021, Kishida touted his listening skills and promised a fresh stimulus package to revive the virus-hit economy, now the fourth-largest in the world.

He vowed to tackle Japan’s demographic crisis and promote a more equitable “new capitalism”, but these policies remained vague, as did his plans to pay for them. 

Seeking to reduce oil and gas imports, under Kishida Japan has steadily been bringing its nuclear power stations — shut down after the 2011 Fukushima disaster — back online.

Despite having a liberal reputation, Kishida was reticent on hot-button social issues such as gay marriage, although his government — which has five female ministers — passed new laws on the number of women in corporate boardrooms.

On foreign policy he won plaudits, siding decisively with Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in 2022, welcoming President Volodymyr Zelensky to a G7 summit in Hiroshima — Kishida’s hometown — and visiting Kyiv.

Kishida also promised to hike military spending in a move welcomed by the United States as it seeks to counter China, while once-frosty relations with South Korea also improved.

But his failure to get to grips with rising consumer prices and scandals involving his party and family translated into tumbling poll ratings for the LDP, which has run Japan almost uninterrupted for decades.

“Unless Mr Kishida stepped down, (LDP insiders believed that) the LDP would face big trouble at the next general election,” said Yu Uchiyama, political science professor at the University of Tokyo.

“By changing the face of the party, the LDP wants to have a fresh image and leave an impression that the LDP has changed. Unless they do that, they believe that they will have a problem,” Uchiyama said.

– Party scandals –

Last year leaked photos of his son partying at the prime minister’s official residence forced Kishida to remove him as his secretary.

Kishida lost four ministers in three months in 2022 including the defence chief, both over alleged ties to the South Korean Unification Church.

The man accused of shooting dead former prime minister Shinzo Abe in July 2022 did so because he believed Abe was tied to the Church, which the attacker resented for personal reasons. 

Kishida — who last year escaped a pipe-bomb attack unscathed — also ruffled feathers by organising a state funeral for Abe instead of a smaller ceremony.

But the biggest scandal was over millions of dollars in alleged kickbacks from LDP fundraising events, which Kishida promised to tackle “like a ball of fire”.

Kishida pushed powerful factions within the LDP to disband, but this angered many party members, said Koichi Nakano, political science professor at Sophia University.

“He has failed to close ranks within the LDP,” Nakano told AFP. 

But he added: “For an LDP leader, staying in power for three years is longer than the average.”