The next leader of Japan’s ruling party will either be the country’s first female prime minister or its youngest leader since the war. But the significance of those milestones will be quickly lost in the party’s attempts to rebuild after two bruising elections that have cast doubt over the future of one of the world’s most successful political machines.
Two of the five candidates vying to replace Shigeru ishiba – who announced his resignation earlier this month – as the next president of the Liberal Democratic party (LDP) have emerged as clear favourites in what analysts are describing as a last-ditch attempt to unify a party battered by a major funding scandal and the cost-of-living crisis.
With just over a week to go before LDP lawmakers and rank-and-file party members cast their votes, Shinjiro Koizumi appears to be on course to become Japan’s youngest postwar prime minister. His elevation to the top job would no longer be a certainty now that the LDP and its junior coalition partner Komeito have lost their majority in both houses of parliament. But he would likely be approved since the LDP is the largest party in the powerful lower house.
The 44-year-old son of maverick former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi is popular with party members and has won praise for his attempts to address the soaring rice prices in his current role as agriculture minister.
His main rival, Sanae Takaichi, is a prominent voice on the right of the LDP – a critic of China with strong ideological links to the former prime minister and foreign policy hawk, Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated in 2022.
But a victory for 64-year-old Takaichi, who has voiced admiration for Margaret Thatcher in her quest to build a “strong and prosperous” Japan, could bring more uncertainty, particularly on the international stage.
Her brand of ultra-conservative politics could create problems for Japan’s relationship with its neighbours. She has played down Japan’s responsibility for its conduct during the second world war and has made regular pilgrimages to Yasukuni, a shrine in Tokyo that honours Japan’s war-dead, including several class-A war criminals.
This week she opened her speech in a debate among the leadership candidates by railing against badly behaved inbound tourists and said “economic migrants” who claim refugee status should be sent home.
Migration, now a key election battleground amid a boom in tourism and a record number of foreign residents, has become a focus of the LDP campaign as it attempts to fend off a challenge from Sanseito, a minor populist party that performed well in July’s upper house elections on a “Japanese first” anti-immigration platform.
Despite his youth, Koizumi – who as environment minister said the fight against the climate crisis could be “sexy and fun” – is seen as a safer pair of hands. The US-educated hereditary politician, who is married to a former TV presenter and counts surfing among his hobbies, has presented himself as the candidate best placed to revive the LDP’s fortunes, and has won the backing of influential figures in the party.
The LDP and its junior coalition partner Komeito lost their lower house majority a year ago and were dealt a similar blow in upper house elections this summer, leaving the outgoing Ishiba in charge of an unstable minority government.
His successor will have to move quickly to address public anger over a “money politics” scandal, in which dozens of LDP lawmakers were found to have siphoned unreported profits from the sale of tickets to party gatherings into slush funds.
While he has previously supported allowing women to become reigning empresses and for married couples to use separate surnames, Koizumi has played down his progressive instincts during the campaign, and echoed Takaichi’s concerns over migration.
“The reality is that illegal employment of foreigners, friction with local residents, and deteriorating public safety are causing anxiety among local residents,” he said this week.
Tobias Harris, the founder of Japan Foresight, said Koizumi had “moderated some of his more progressive positions on social issues in a bid to appeal to more conservative lawmakers and in general is emphasising the importance of unity and humility for leading the LDP out of its political crisis”.
Harris added that there was “a sense that both the parliamentary party and the grassroots party feel alarmed enough about the LDP’s future to gamble on elevating Koizumi … this appears to be Koizumi’s race to lose”.
The new leader will be elected by 295 LDP lawmakers and almost 1 million rank-and-file party members, whose ballots will be converted into an additional 295 votes.
If none of the five candidates – all of whom ran unsuccessfully against Ishiba last year – wins more than half of the votes, the top two will immediately enter a runoff, a process that will give MPs’ votes greater weight.
