Less than a year after becoming prime minister of Japan, Yoshihide Suga said on Friday that he would not seek re-election as head of the governing party, opening the way for a new leader after his historically unpopular tenure.
Mr Suga, 72, assumed the prime ministership after Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, resigned last August because of ill health. Mr Suga, the son of a strawberry farmer and a schoolteacher from the country’s rural north, had been a behind-the-scenes operator and often looked uncomfortable as a public-facing leader.
His early departure threatens to return Japan, in the midst of its worst wave yet of the coronavirus, to the leadership instability that marked the period before Mr Abe’s nearly eight consecutive years in power. During that time, the country churned through six prime ministers in six years, including Mr Abe himself in an earlier stint.
At a hastily convened news conference on Friday afternoon, Mr Suga said that he wanted to focus on managing the pandemic rather than running a re-election campaign. With the party leadership contest scheduled to begin Sept. 17, he said, “I realized that I need enormous energy” and “I cannot do both. I have to choose one.”
In the days before the surprise announcement, Mr Suga appeared to be trying to salvage his leadership, which had been dogged by plunging approval ratings amid public dissatisfaction with his administration’s handling of the pandemic and the Olympics.
When a rival, former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida, announced last month that he would stand for the leadership of the governing Liberal Democratic Party, rumours circulated that Mr Suga might dissolve Parliament early and call a general election in a last-ditch effort to retain his position.
He had also suggested that he would reshuffle his cabinet and other leadership positions within the party. But in the end, with coronavirus cases hitting record highs and hospitals turning away patients amid a wobbly vaccine rollout, he apparently decided that he had no viable path.
The race to replace Mr Suga in the Sept. 29 vote for the leader of the Liberal Democrats appears relatively open.
Mr Kishida, the former foreign minister, was the only declared candidate this week, though a former communications minister, Sanae Takaichi — who was one of the few female members of Mr Abe’s cabinet — has expressed interest. A few hours after Mr Suga made his announcement, Taro Kono, a more liberal-leaning iconoclast who has served as foreign and defence minister and has more recently led the vaccine rollout, said he was consulting with allies about whether to run.
The winner of the party leadership race will most likely be designated prime minister by Parliament and then lead the party into a general election that must be held by late next month. The Liberal Democrats have held power in Japan for almost the entire postwar era, and the political opposition has been in disarray for the past decade, after being blamed for a mismanaged response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
The Liberal Democrats, while an overwhelming favourite to retain power, may still be seeking a strategic advantage by installing a new prime minister in the weeks before the general election.
The opposition “will have a harder time running against someone who is maybe enjoying a honeymoon and looks new and fresh and promising change that makes people feel a little more optimistic,” said Tobias Harris, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington and a specialist in Japanese politics.
While Japan had been plagued by revolving-door leadership, complicating efforts to tackle entrenched economic and demographic problems, Mr Suga’s increasingly desperate scramble to keep his job was without recent precedent, analysts said.
“I can’t quite recall this degree of confusion,” said Koichi Nakano, a political scientist at Sophia University in Tokyo. “I think he was really struggling and feeling isolated, and his desperate attempts to cling to power backfired one after another,” he added.
In many respects, Mr Suga’s quick rise and fall could be attributed to timing. When Mr Abe resigned, the party bosses decided they did not want a bruising leadership contest and quickly aligned behind Mr Suga, a power broker and chief spokesman for Mr Abe who was perceived as malleable and willing to carry on his policies.
Although Mr Kishida also ran in the leadership election last fall, the party anointed Mr Suga in what was largely seen as a rubber-stamp vote.
But public frustrations with Mr Suga grew as Japan, which had managed the pandemic quite well in 2020, took months to ramp up its vaccine rollout and left the population weary with continued economic restrictions. Concerns that the government was ploughing ahead with the Olympics as cases rose in Tokyo and surrounding prefectures also damaged Mr Suga’s credibility.
By early last month, Mr Suga’s approval ratings, which were above 60 per cent at the beginning of the year, had plunged below 30 per cent.
As a deeply uncharismatic leader who struggled to connect with the public, Mr Suga shouldered the blame for the broader failings of the Japanese bureaucracy, which held up vaccinations with requirements for domestic clinical testing and limits on who could administer the vaccines.
“His communication with the public was not very effective,” said Sheila A. Smith, a senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
Mr Suga also embodied a larger, deep-seated challenge facing Japan’s government, Ms Smith said. “When you have a crisis, you need an adaptable, break-all-the-rules, get-things-done kind of response, and that is a little harder for Japan,” she said.
Perhaps most critically, Mr Suga, who once had the support of the party’s bosses in its factional governing system — including Mr Abe, who still wields influence behind the scenes — appeared to have lost his backers.
Once the party elects a new leader this month, that person will most likely be officially designated prime minister by Parliament. But because the current term of the House of Representatives expires next month, the party will have to call a general election by no later than Oct. 21. The new leader could dissolve Parliament before the term expires, which would allow a general election to be postponed to late November.
Despite widespread dissatisfaction with the government’s response to the pandemic, political analysts say it will be tough for any opposition party to unseat the Liberal Democrats.
“I am sure many frustrated people really wanted to vote for another party or representatives who may do better,” said Tsuneo Watanabe, a senior fellow at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation in Tokyo. “But at this moment, there is no strong alternative to the L.D.P., and that is a failure of the Japanese political system.”
