By Max Sato
(MaceNews) – Faced with voter discontent with government failure to contain the pandemic, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga plans to call a snap election for the lower house of parliament in mid-September, delaying the already announced process to pick the ruling party chief, the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper reported late Tuesday.
Suga is expected to reshuffle both the top executives of his Liberal Democratic Party and cabinet next week and postpone the Sept. 29 party leadership poll, for which he and a few others are running, until after the election of the House of Representatives, which is likely to be held on Oct. 17, the daily said, quoting unnamed senior officials in the ruling coalition.
Some party leaders are considering reopening the Diet temporarily around Sept. 14 to 16 to allow the prime minister to dissolve the lower house and call an election, the Mainichi said.
While Suga’s re-election bid is supported by some party members, others are critical of his leadership and back his soft-spoken rival Fumio Kishida, 64, who served as foreign minister from 2012 to 2017, the paper said. Administrative Reform Minister Taro Kono, 58, who is in charge of coronavirus vaccination, is also popular in public opinion polls. Kishida is in the LDP leadership race but Kono hasn’t announced whether he will run.
Suga, 72, is now distancing himself from his main supporter Toshihiro Nikai, 82, whose high-handed manner is unpopular among voters and party members. Suga told Nikai on Monday that he planned to replace him as the LDP secretary-general, the number two post at the party, news reports said.
When Suga took over from Shinzo Abe, who stepped down for health reasons in September last year, the approval rating of his new cabinet was fairly high above 60%, but has slumped to 30% to 40% and stayed low, according to opinion polls by major news media.
Many voters are dissatisfied with what critics call a ‘half-baked’ approach toward containing the spread of COVID-19 while keeping the economy open with restrictions short of lockdowns. There was public outrage over the organizers’ decision to go ahead with the Tokyo Olympics from July 23 to Aug. 8 amid rising coronavirus cases while the Japanese government is urging people to stay home and avoid non-essential shopping and traveling.
The Aug. 28 survey by the Mainichi Shimbun and the Social Survey Research Center showed that the approval rating of the Suga administration slipped to 26%, its lowest, from 30% in the previous Mainichi survey conducted July 17. The disapproval rating rose to 66%, its worst, from 62% previously.
The weekend survey also showed that 70% of those polled said they didn’t support the Suga government’s measures to combat COVID-19, up from 63% in July, while only 14% (down from 19%) said they endorsed those measures, which include one-and-off restrictions on businesses and public events as well as a relatively slow vaccine rollout compared to other major economies.
The opinion poll by the Nikkei newspaper and its affiliate TV Tokyo, which was conducted from Aug. 27 to 29, indicates the Suga cabinet approval rating remains low at 34%, unchanged from their previous survey, and that the disapproval rating was 56%, little changed from 57% in July, with many citing a lack of leadership.
The embattled prime minister is serving the remainder of Abe’s third three-year term until Sept. 30 this year as the LDP president, and thus premiership due to the party’s majority in both chambers of parliament.
If the prime minister were to let lower house members serve their full four-year term, general elections must be held within 30 days of the Oct. 21 expiration of the term, which means people would go to the polls on one of the four Sundays from Sept. 26 to Oct. 17. (Technically, the prime minister could hold an extraordinary Diet session until Oct. 21 to delay the election until Nov. 28.)
But waiting until the last minute is rare in Japan. The leader of the ruling party has tended to dissolve the house two to three years after the last election, either seeking to cash in on high approval ratings or being forced into calling an election with a new platform to turn things around. Suga is being forced to call an election late as he has focused on dealing with coronavirus cases, hoping to claim victory over the pandemic.