Maroc - EURASIAREVIEW.COM - A la une - 02/Sep 22:54

Kishida’s Departure As Japan’s Prime Minister Leaves An Open Field – OpEd

Japan’s longest serving prime minister Shinzo Abe is remembered as a pragmatist. It seems that Japan’s outgoing prime minister Kishida may be remembered as a compromiser, despite some achievements during his premiership.  What’s the difference between a pragmatist and a political compromiser? Outcomes. And a measure of conviction. By the end of this month Japan will have a new Prime Minister after Kishida announced his departure from the LDP leadership in mid-August. Kishida lasted almost three years at the helm, becoming Japan’s eighth-longest-serving post-war prime minister. He was never really popular and former prime minister Abe cast a long shadow over Kishida’s premiership, and over Japanese politics, especially after his assassination in July 2022. The contest in the ruling Liberal DemocraticParty (LDP) to replace Kishida is on, with an open field and no clear frontrunner. A general election has to be held by late next year but opposition parties are in disarray and, as usual, it’s likely to be a matter of how dominant the LDP will be. Apart from Abe and Kishida, in recent years Japan has had a revolving door of prime ministers with seven leaders in seven years. Comparing Kishida’s tenure with that of Abe’s as Japan’s longest-serving prime minister is instructive to understand how Japan can avoid presenting a different face at global leaders’ summits each year. It was never very clear to the Japanese public what Fumio Kishida stood for beyond being in power. Everyone knew what Abe stood for: making Japan a more normal country again by unshackling Japan’s post-war constraints. Abe learnt the lesson from his short-lived initial stint as prime minister in 2006 that a necessary condition to stay in power and maintain popular support was progress on the economy. His popularity would dip when he focused on security but as a pragmatist, he knew his popularity would recover when he shifted his focus away from security to the economy. As Ryo Sahashi argues inthe first of this week’s lead articles, ‘as a man who genuinely wanted to become prime minister, Kishida focused on acquiring and maintaining power beyond being in power’. From day one, his New Capitalism plan for the economy to have a fairer society went nowhere after he failed to take on vested interests that opposed him within his own party. As Ben Ascione points outin our second lead article this week, throughout Kishida’s tenure, he relied on and cooperated with the LDP’s conservative-nationalists, particularly the Abe faction, disappointing the party’s centrists. Kishida’s New Capitalism ‘initially seemed to represent a shift away from Abenomics’ but ‘pressure from the Abe faction forced Kishida to emphasise continuity’, Ascione explains. The result was a disappointed public, and unhappy centrists and unimpressed conservatives within the LDP. Sahashi and Ascione note Kishida’s achievements, which were mostly international. He committed Japan to doubling its annual defence spending to 2 per cent of GDP by 2027, including to develop Japan’s missile counter-strike capability. His response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was decisive with sanctions and security assistance to Ukraine. As a moderate in Japanese politics, it was easier for Kishida to adopt policies from the right— the opposite of Abe or Nixon going to China. For the public, though, it seemed the Abe faction in the LDP was calling the shots. Under Kishida’s leadership, the important US relationship was strengthened and the relationship with South Korea repaired. Kishida put his stamp on the G7 summit in Hiroshima in 2023. A shrewder leader may have called a general election after his success then. Whoever wins the leadership contest will only stay in power for longer than a year if they remember Bill Clinton’s strategist James Carville’s advice: ‘it’s the economy, stupid’. The reform agenda is clear but it will take leadership to break through the vested interests in society and in the LDP to deliver it. Abe, but especially Kishida, shied away from difficult reforms that would expend political capital in favour of easier, more superficial measures. Even where Abe succeeded in reviving the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, for example, Japan opened markets up just enough to get across the line, but he too failed to use the external leverage for deeper domestic economic reforms. Subsidies to try to boost the fertility rate to lift Japan’s population have time and again proven to make no significant difference. What’s needed is to dismantle obvious barriers and to reform Japanese institutions. With a shrinking and ageing population, a stagnant economy and huge public debt, not only are difficult reforms needed on migration and in other areas, but success will grow political capital. There are close to a dozen candidates in the LDP race for the Japanese prime ministership. Two frontrunners — reformer Shinjiro Koizumi, son of former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, and former economic security minister Takayuki Kobayashi, a fiscal conservative and former bureaucrat — represent generational change. Two other reformers, Shigeru Ishiba and Taro Kono, are building support while current minister for economic security Sanae Takaichi is in third place and is the best chance for Japan’s first female leader. Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa is an outside chance, as is her predecessor Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi. Whoever comes out on top of the field this month will want to focus on pragmatism and conviction over compromise they are to fix the economy. Source: This article was published by East Asia Forum. The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.The ANU will convene the annualJapan Update conferenceon 4 September which will be live streamed. Please join online or in person in Canberra.