This article was originally published by Pacific Forum. It is republished with permission.
Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) got a facelift last month. The election of Shigeru Ishiba, a five-time candidate, as party president gives the party a new look. But, as with all cosmetic surgery, the changes are more superficial than substantive.
Ishiba will struggle to steer the party in the direction he would like. The most cynical interpretation is that he has been elected to make the party more attractive in the general election that he has called for later this month. Once that job is done, the old guard will get to work undermining him and reasserting its dominance within the party.
Ishiba scored a come-from-behind win in the recent party election. Nine candidates, the most ever, contested the race for LDP president. (Because the LDP holds a majority in the Diet, or parliament, the party president automatically becomes prime minister.)
He came in second in the first round of voting, but because no candidate secured a majority, a runoff was held among the top two vote-getters, Ishiba and then-Economic Security Minister Takaichi Sanae. Takaichi, one of two women running for the job, is a conservative nationalist and acolyte of former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, who was assassinated two years ago.
While she won the most votes in the first round, there is considerable discomfort with Takaichi’s hardline positions and – to be honest – with the idea of a woman as prime minister. Ishiba prevailed in the second round as supporters of the other seven candidates backed him instead of Takaichi.
Ishiba, the perennial challenger, owes his victory to a breakdown of the LDP’s organizational structure. A large, sprawling party that encompasses a variety of viewpoints, it has remained united largely by the perks that come with power.
Members have joined factions, habatsu, headed by senior politicians. These factions provide younger members with money and the opportunity to rise through the ranks. The faction gives those elders status and power within the party, varying according to faction size.
In the past, those elders gathered before elections to select winners and hand out key party and cabinet positions – the classic smoke-filled room. In his four previous contests, Ishiba was sidelined during those deliberations.
Last year, however, a political funds scandal hit the biggest and most powerful factions the hardest, effectively stripping them of their power.
It also tarred Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, whose fumbling response and inability to impose punishment on individuals who broke the law pushed his and his Cabinet’s approval ratings to historic lows and obliged him to abandon his dream of a second term.
In the absence of those large-faction leaders, the LDP politicians who voted for party president were free to vote as they chose – although senior party members retained considerable influence by dint of their age and experience.
Weighing heavily on their deliberations was the victor’s anticipated impact on their electoral prospects. As one diplomat explained, they were thinking of who they wanted to be seen standing next to in posters for their next campaign.
Stand by me
Ishiba is that person. He is viewed sympathetically by the public and both his policies and his political style are more in sync with those of the Japanese mainstream.
He is socially liberal, concerned about growing inequality and budget deficits. He believes that Japan has international obligations but he is not committed to the high profile that has been pursued by recent governments in Tokyo.
He has been a stark contrast with—and a foil to—former Prime Minister Abe, challenging him in elections and on the Diet floor, earning him the label “the anti-Abe.” His opposition to the LDP mainstream, which has been shaped by and reflects Abe’s beliefs and positions, made him a pariah in the party—until now.
Ishiba’s new Cabinet is distinguished by the absence of members of the biggest factions, those tarred by the scandal. Nevertheless, it looks a lot like its predecessors, with several politicians either remaining in their current posts or returning to those they held before.
There is continuity in another, dispiriting sense: Women are again under-represented, holding just two of the 19 positions: minister of education and state minister in charge of children’s policies.
Ishiba won with the support of his two immediate predecessors as prime minister, Yoshihide Suga and Kishida. Both worried that Takaichi was too conservative and too radical and that she threatened to undo many of their most important accomplishments. They used their influence to rally support for the former upstart.
That aid propelled Ishiba into the position he had long coveted but it may not be enough to keep him there. The party will back him throughout the general election campaign and exploit his popularity and his fresh image for that ballot. But once the vote is over and its parliamentary majority secured, the old guard will get to work pushing its agenda and priorities.
It can get ugly. It has happened before. Twenty years ago, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi faced such powerful resistance to his policies that he courted candidates to challenge incumbents from his own party. He called them “assassins.”
While many of them won in general elections, his – and their – influence proved limited. His efforts to enact substantial reforms were either frustrated while he was in power or, when they were realized, were rolled back by subsequent administrations.
Ishiba will face similar headwinds. The country has structural problems. The grayest country in the world, Japan faces a looming demographic crisis. Its national debt of 265 percent of GDP is the largest of any developed economy – yet the government must find more funds to support an aging population, promote childcare and fulfill the pledge to double defense spending.
Ishiba’s concern about reconciling those demands with revenue is one of the key issues with which he breaks with the Abe tradition, which dismisses such accounting as “an end in itself.”
Addressing those issues would be a challenge for any politician, much less one who is outside his own party’s mainstream. Worse, the old guard has already – two days after his election – drawn lines and signaled that its tolerance for deviations from party orthodoxy is limited.
While these are matters of Japan’s domestic politics, they matter a lot to the United States. Japan is a key ally and partner in the Indo-Pacific, the most dynamic region in the global economy.
Tokyo has provided the intellectual framework for US thinking about this vital region – as well as the diplomatic energy to promote critical economic initiatives such as the Comprehensive Partnership for Trans-Pacific Prosperity (CPTPP) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) when the US has faltered.
Japan is at the center of the latticework of regional security initiatives, connecting various mechanisms while serving as the key US regional ally. The United States seeks continuity and stability in Japanese politics no matter who the prime minister is. Washington might want to prepare for frustration.
Brad Glosserman (brad@pacforum.org) is deputy director of and visiting professor at the Center for Rule-Making Strategies at Tama University as well as senior adviser (nonresident) at Pacific Forum. He is the author of “Peak Japan: The End of Great Ambitions” (Georgetown University Press, 2019).