Issue:
October 2024
The LDP leadership election result was a rejection of Shinzo Abe’s legacy. But his acolytes will regroup
Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) heavyweight Shigeru Ishiba, a political outsider in recent years, is now the ultimate insider, having won the September 27 party presidential election – a victory that will see him approved as Japan’s next prime minister.
While the election was held to replace Fumio Kishida, it was really about whether the LDP truly would, or could, move past the tainted legacy of one of its most powerful and controversial figures: the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Ishiba won the presidency two years to the day after a state funeral was held for Abe, who was assassinated in July 2022 while campaigning for a candidate in the upper house election. Abe was killed in front of Yamato Saidaiji station in Nara Prefecture, where erstwhile LDP presidential hopeful Sanae Takaichi, his close friend and loyal ally, has a lower house seat.
The suspect, Tetsuya Yamagami, told police he had targeted Abe for embracing the Unification Church. In the months that followed Abe’s death, media shed light on decades of connections between the former prime minister, senior LDP officials in his political faction, and the church. That was followed by revelations of an elaborate kickback scheme, centered on the Abe faction, that provided illegal, off-the-books slush funds to faction members.
The dark side of the Abe years have been exposed over the past three years, even as Abe apologists churned out books and magazines attempting to deify him. By the time Kishida announced on August 14 that he would step down, the battle lines had been drawn between candidates who wanted to continue Abe's legacy and those who wanted to chart a new course.
Conservative, rightwing hawks like economic security minister Takaichi and former economic security minister Takayuki Kobayashi saw themselves as heirs to Abe's political and social agenda. Kobayashi was the darling of younger, conservative and rightwing media and IT/financial types. But it quickly became apparent that his vague policy ideas were not winning him much support and he sank like stone in media polls.
Takaichi, on the other hand, was the obvious successor to Abe. He backed her in the initial round of the 2021 LDP presidential race and she made it clear she wanted to continue his economic and social programs. Takaichi, more so than Kobayashi, came across as a technocrat, giving a long, heavily wonkish press conference to announce her candidacy.
But ideology may not have been the only thing Takaichi inherited from Abe. She appeared to have had the backing of rightwing media who also loved Abe. In the final week of the campaign, no fewer than five books authored by Takaichi were prominently displayed in major bookstores, while rightwing magazines such as WiLL and Hanada read like Takaichi fanzines. Her YouTube channel had over 3.1 million views, far more than Kobayashi’s roughly 643,000, and light years beyond Ishiba’s 114,000. One wonders how much traffic to her channel was driven by the netto uyoku – Japan’s online far right – who once supported Abe.
While Takaichi and Kobayashi preferred to take the LDP and the country back to the Abe years, Ishiba and other candidates wanted to consign that era to history's dustbin, starting with the lingering anger over the slush funds scandal. When all nine candidates were asked whether they would consider reopening a party investigation into LDP members – almost all from the Abe faction – caught up in the political funds scandal, none said they would.
Ishiba’s criticism of the party, the funding scandal and LDP members’ ties to the Unification Church, and the fact he appeared squeaky clean compared to the Abe faction members, made him the most popular choice in media polls to be the next LDP leader. But he not only had Abe allies like Takaichi and Kobayashi to worry about if he made it to the second and final round of voting - he also had to concern himself with Taro Aso.
Aso and Ishiba do not like each other. The conventional wisdom before September 27 was that Aso could still make or break LDP presidential candidates. So, on the evening of September 26, Ishiba met Aso to try to work something out. Whatever was said, however, it was reported afterwards that Aso would back Takaichi if she faced off against Ishiba.
With that, Takaichi’s political and media supporters woke up on September 27 quietly confident that she would win. When Takaichi finished first and Ishiba second in the initial round of voting, journalists began prewriting “Japan will get its first female prime minister” stories in anticipation of the final vote.
But what everyone may have forgotten was that there was another very influential figure determining the final count: Kishida himself.
At the time of writing, it isn’t entirely clear what Kishida did, or said, to his own former faction members and allies that might have swung the vote to Ishiba. However, there are plausible theories discussed by pundits in the hours following his win.
The first is the “the enemy of my enemy is friend” theory. Although Kishida disliked the thought of Ishiba as his successor, he disliked the thought of Takaichi replacing him even more, and so rallied his former faction members and allies against her to hand Ishiba victory.
Then there is the “geopolitical realities” theory. The candidates focused on domestic issues, but the campaign period was marked by China indicating it would lift a ban on Japanese seafood it put in place after last year’s release of treated water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. On the other hand, the violation of Japanese airspace by a Russian plane reminded everyone that, in addition to China and North Korea, the next Japanese leader has to deal with Vladimir Putin, something Abe tried, and utterly failed.
The theory goes that Kishida may have asked himself who - Ishiba or Takaichi – was best equipped to deal with Xi, Putin, and Kim – a pragmatic leader like Ishiba who eschewed anti-China rhetoric, or a candidate with a long history of inflammatory anti-Chinese/anti-North Korean rhetoric like Takaichi.
Finally, there is the “U.S.-Japan relations” and Kishida legacy theory. Kishida visited U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington D.C. days before the LDP election, and about a month before America’s presidential election.
He no doubt wondered which LDP candidate could best handle the U.S. relationship under a Kamala Harris presidency, and who might be best if Donald Trump was reelected. But the question somebody in the U.S. might have posed to Kishida or his advisors is: which LDP candidate is best for the U.S. to meet its requirement of smooth relations between its two allies in East Asia, South Korea and Japan?
If the U.S.-Japan theory is correct, then Kishida had the choice of backing either a politician who would be unlikely to provoke Korean anger over historical issues (Ishiba) or an ideologue who insists on going to Yasukuni Shrine (Takaichi).
The result means that, for now, those who wanted to carry on the Abe legacy find themselves where Ishiba was before the election. They are political outsiders who will be forced to curry favor with a prime minister they do not like, and whom some even loathe. But while they may be down, they are not out and have the numbers to make life uncomfortable for the Ishiba administration.
Ishiba, meanwhile, must now prepare for a lower house election he has called for October 27. That will not only affect his future; it will also help determine whether the LDP remains a ruling party that is dominated by Abe’s legacy or one that has freed itself from it ... or an opposition party that discovered that many voters no longer cared what happened to it.
H.L. Stone is the pen name for a Japan-based journalist and FCCJ member
