Kishida declines the fight

On 14 August, in a brief appearance at the prime minister’s office in Tokyo, Fumio Kishida told reporters that he would not run in the leadership election of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) the following month, and would therefore step down as prime minister when his term ended in late September. The announcement ended months of speculation about his future and set Japan on course for its third prime minister since the autumn of 2021.

‘Politics cannot function without public trust,’ Mr Kishida said at the news conference, framing the decision as a necessary step to rebuild a party damaged by a slush-fund scandal that had broken at the end of last year. He said he would support the new leader as an ordinary member of the party rather than campaign from the top, and that the contest had to be open enough to show voters a changed LDP.

The funding scandal centred on unreported kickbacks from fundraising parties among factions of the LDP, and it had eaten into Mr Kishida’s approval ratings through the spring and summer, leaving them at levels that made his re-election effectively unwinnable. Opinion polls in recent weeks had shown support for his cabinet in the low teens, a figure rarely seen for a sitting Japanese prime minister. Rather than fight a losing contest, he chose to leave the field open and let the party choose a new face.

The LDP is to choose its new president on 27 September. Because the party holds a majority in the lower house, its winner will become prime minister almost automatically, and by the end of the month Japan will have a new head of government who was not on the ballot when voters last went to the polls. As of this week more than a dozen figures from the party’s different factions had signalled an interest in standing, making the contest unusually open.

Mr Kishida, 67, had served as prime minister since October 2021. His time in office was marked by a firm stance on defence, a weak yen, and a sustained diplomatic push to rebuild relations with South Korea, none of which proved enough to rescue his domestic standing. The slush-fund investigation drew in senior figures from several factions, and by the spring the party’s support had fallen so far that Mr Kishida’s own position within the LDP was quietly untenable. He leaves the party’s internal reform unfinished: the LDP has promised to dissolve the factions that produced the scandal, but the question of how much real change a new leader can deliver remains open.

The immediate question, then, is who follows him. The September contest will be decided by a combination of parliamentarians, party members and regional chapters, and the frontrunners include figures from the old factions Mr Kishida himself once led. Opinion polls suggest voters are in no mood to forgive the LDP quickly, whoever the new leader turns out to be, and the next general election, which must be held within two years, will be the first test of whether the party’s efforts to remake itself have been enough. His decision to decline the fight has opened the door; who walks through it is now the party’s to decide, and the country will know by the first days of autumn.