“Right now, it is impossible to say who is going to emerge from the pack,” said Koichi Nakano, a professor of politics at Tokyo’s Sophia University.
“Ishiba may be the leading contender now, but that may in part because he earned a reputation for running in leadership votes in the past, but he needs to work out which of the other candidates have similar [policy] positions and similar support bases in the party,” Nakano told This Week in Asia.
According to a poll conducted by Kyodo News over the weekend, some 25.3 per cent of the public were in favour of former party secretary general Ishiba taking over from Kishida, with former environment minister Shinjiro Koizumi on 19.6 per cent and Sanae Takaichi on 10.1 per cent.
Digital reform minister Taro Kono was on 11.2 per cent while the other candidates – including, surprisingly, former prime minister Yoshihide Suga – were all hovering slightly below the 10 per cent threshold and jostling to make their voices heard.
Speaking in Tokyo on Sunday, Ishiba, 67, told reporters he was “on track” to secure the 20 endorsements that candidates require from fellow politicians to stand in the leadership race. He added that he intends to hold a press conference in his home prefecture of Tottori to formally announce his bid, which will be the fifth for the party presidency.
Nakano said while Ishiba was popular with the public and LPD rank-and-file members, it was likely that he would once again be defeated at the last hurdle.
“He is making the early running, but it is important to remember that this is not really an ‘election’ but an internal affair of the LDP,” Nakano said. All party members vote in the primary vote, accounting for around 1 per cent of the entire population of Japan, but those members’ votes are heavily outweighed by the votes cast by parliamentarians.
Ishiba was initially favoured ahead of former prime minister Shinzo Abe in the 2012 election, Nakano pointed out, only to be defeated by the politicians’ votes.
With Ishiba being something of a polarising figure in the party, Nakano said he believed it was unlikely he could pull together enough support.
“Ishiba’s chances are very poor,” agreed Ken Kato, a politically conservative businessman from Tokyo and a paid-up member of the LDP.
“He may be popular with the general public and the media, but conservatives hate him for his attacks on Abe in the past,” he said. “We see that as a betrayal of Abe and, more importantly, the party.”
Kato said he was firmly behind Takaichi due to her conservative credentials.
“She was a firm supporter of Abe when he was prime minister and I see her as the legitimate heir of his policies and political vision,” he said. “She is not a member of any faction and has a lot of experience … [she is also] not getting involved in any scandals or ‘dirty politics’.”
Nakano was less convinced, suggesting that her star had waned since Abe was assassinated in July 2022 and that his former faction was in disarray as a result of the scandal over the Unification Church’s links to the party – one of the scandals that had brought the Kishida administration down.
“Abe used her as a proxy standard-bearer, but we must remember that at its heart, the LDP is a deeply conservative, misogynistic party that will not want a woman as its leader.”
Nakano said he believed the right-wing of the party could well coalesce behind the rising star of Takayuki Kobayashi, a deeply conservative former elite bureaucrat with the Ministry of Finance who had served under Kishida as minister for economic security. At 49, he is young and this leadership election may have come too soon for him, but Nakano is confident that the party presidency will one day be his.
Whoever emerges on victorious on September 27, the largest obstacle they will face is clear: a lack of public trust in the party.
The Kyodo News poll showed that 78 per cent of respondents said Kishida’s decision not to stand again in order to take responsibility for scandals in the party, including over huge slush funds built up by dozens of politicians, was not sufficient to restore their faith in the LDP.
“It is a huge hurdle, but I expect the LDP to use the next five weeks to monopolise the attention of the media and repeat the message that the new leader will have faced tough competition and is the new unifier of the party,” Nakano said.
“The LDP will count on that for success, completely overshadowing the leadership election for the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan in the media, and then I would not be at all surprised if the new leader calls a snap general election as soon as he or she is elected, taking advantage of all the coverage and the bump that a new leader often gets.”