Hyderabad: The Prime Minister designate of Japan, Yomiuri Shimbun Fumio Kishida, will be Japan’s third prime minister in just over a year, replacing the outgoing PM Yoshihide Suga. Suga became the prime minister when Shinzo Abe stepped down due to medical complications in last September.
Kishida, who was born on 29 July 1957, graduated from the School of Law, Waseda University in 1982. Kishida started his professional career as a banker before becoming a secretary for his father, Fumitake. Now he is all set to become the next PM of Japan. Kishida will be appointed prime minister in an extraordinary Imperial Diet session to be convened on October 4.
Political Profile of Kishida
Kishida, leads Kochikai, a faction in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that is also known as the Kishida faction. Interestingly, he lost to the outgoing PM Suga in the party presidential election last year.
Kishida has become the third LDP president to have been elected to the Diet from Hiroshima Prefecture since World War II, following prime ministers Hayato Ikeda in the 1960s and Kiichi Miyazawa in the 1990s. Born in Tokyo to a family of politicians — with his grandfather and father also having served as House of Representatives members.
In 1993, Kishida was elected to the House of Representatives for the first time. Kishida has also served as the minister of foreign affairs. In December 2012, Kishida was appointed as foreign minister when then prime minister Shinzo Abe launched his second administration. He was Japan’s second longest-serving foreign minister since the end of World War II, with a tenure spanning four years and seven months.
LDP elects Kishida as Head
The LDP elected Fumio Kishida as its 27th president, and his term as party president runs through Sept. 30, 2024. The former LDP Policy Research Council chairperson earned 257 votes in a runoff to defeat Taro Kono, the administrative and regulatory reform minister, who won 170 votes. In last year’s presidential election, Kishida earned the second-most votes after Suga.
The LDP election was held after PM Suga made an announcement that he would not seek reelection to lead the ruling party. In the first round, candidates vied for 764 votes, half from Diet members and half based on votes from rank-and-file members and members of affiliated groups. Kishida finished in the top spot with 256 votes, while Kono, 58, earned the second-most ballots with 255. They were followed by former internal affairs and communications minister Sanae Takaichi with 188 and LDP executive acting secretary-general Seiko Noda with 63.
What awaits Kishida as PM
Kishida will face the same challenges of overcoming bureaucratic and vested interests to raise productivity amid rising debt levels, an ageing population, and geopolitical and other economic threats like the outgoing PM whose pledges to drive microeconomic reform ran into roadblocks.
Japan’s fiscal hawks will also pressure the new leader to commit to another hike in the consumption tax rate, a move that has previously sparked a recession. In monetary policy, the new leader will also play a role in Bank of Japan policy, is required to elect a successor to the current governor, Kuroda Haruhiko, whose term in office expires in April 2023.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has praised Abenomics for easing financial conditions, reducing the fiscal deficit, and improving employment and female labour force participation. Nevertheless, the IMF warned in February 2020 that structural reforms had been slow to progress, with bottlenecks remaining in the labour, product, and service markets, exacerbated by demographic trends that project the population shrinking by over a quarter by 2065. However, with employment still lower than its pre-pandemic level and core consumer price inflation falling into negative territory, the nation is yet to stage a full recovery from Covid.
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Geo-Political challenges
In the context of uncertainty, what is near certain is the concern that the next prime minister will have her/his job cut out in the face of changing, unpredictable regional and global strategic equations especially with Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States announcing AUKUS, a new security pact for the Indo-Pacific region. China will also be looking at the Japanese elections with a keen interest to keep the Asian balance of power in its favour.
Since 2017, QUAD has come to occupy an important place in Asian geopolitics, and the United States is pivoting it to keep its relevance in the region. India views QUAD as a platform for cooperation with like-minded democracies on issues pertaining to Asia. The members of the group have declared that it is not a hedge against China; rather QUAD is the manifestation of a group that seeks to democratise the way geopolitics is played out in Asia. Japan holds a pole position and QUAD members want politico-economic stability in that country.
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Japan has extensive and intricate economic and cultural relations with China, its largest trading partner. From the Chinese perspective, decoupling with Japan is undesirable as the latter is fourth in the pecking order of its trading partners. On the other end of the relationship, China is a cause of concern for its eastern neighbour, especially due to its increasing assertion in the South and East China Seas. Chinese adventurism has irked its Asian neighbours, including Japan.
As recent as early September 2021, the issue of the Taiwan Strait has put Japan on high alert about Chinese intentions. At the same time, the defence relationship between Japan and Vietnam has made Beijing uncomfortable. The change of guard in Tokyo will have significant implications for China-Japan relations as well as the evolving geo-strategic matrix in the Indo-Pacific.
It will also define how QUAD would play out. It is only through QUAD and like-minded democracies that the freedom of navigation and economic and maritime interests of all can be maintained in the Indo-Pacific Ocean region.
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