— Takaichi to Replace Outgoing PM Ishiba Who Has Stepped Down to Take Blame for General Election Losses
By Max Sato
(Mace News) – Japan is set to have its first woman Prime Minister as hardline member of parliament Sanae Takaichi won conservative Liberal Democratic Party leadership on Saturday, shifting gear away from a slightly more liberal rule under rival Shigeru Ishiba.
Former economic security minister Takaichi, 64, beat reformist farm minister Shinjiro Koizumi, 44, in a runoff by scoring 185 votes: 149 votes from LDP members of parliament and 36 rank-and-file votes from the total 47 prefectures. Koizumi, 44, clinched 156 votes, 145 from the MPs and just 11 from prefectural representation.
Takaichi is likely to be elected as Prime Minster in the Diet in an extraordinary session on Oct. 15 despite the LDP-led ruling coalition’s minority seats in both chambers, thanks to expected support from smaller conservative parties in the opposition camp.
Just after the runoff win, Takaichi told her fellow LDP members that “real tough times are ahead” for the party that has been punished in lower and upper house elections in the aftermath of a series of political funding scandals and members’ close links to the controversial Unification Church.
After less than a year in power, Prime Minister Ishiba, a 68-year old veteran LDP politician, said last month that he was stepping down to take the blame for leading the ruling coalition to crushing defeats in general elections, first in the all-important lower house in October and then in the upper house in July.
Takaichi urged her colleagues to “work hard” in their own specialized fields to regain voter support and rebuild the party, declaring that she will “ditch the life-work balance.”
There is no stark difference in economic policies among the five contenders that fought for the top LDP position. All of them called for measures to cushion the impact of easing but still elevated costs of living and guide the country toward a more sustainable growth path backed by wage hikes.
On the political front, Takaichi is known to have right-wing views on Japan’s wartime aggression. She is opposed to same-sex marriage and against changing the law to allow women to keep their maiden names when they register marriage.
Koizumi is a blueblood politician and the youngest of the five candidates. He is considered more liberal than others. His father, former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi pushed for the privatization of the postal delivery and financial services monopoly while in office from 2001 until 2006.
Prime Minister Ishiba and Shinjiro Koizumi have worked together in the current administration to clearly end the decades-old party policy to keep output of rice lower for the purpose of shoring up the producer prices of the national staple. Farmers and countryside voters used to set the political landscape but urban votes have become more important in recent years.
The LDP candidates sought a majority of the total 590 votes, 290 from LDP members of parliament (one vote per MP) and 295 from about the 910,000 rank and file (the latter votes were cast by the end of Friday). In the absence of a majority winner, the top two were to compete in a runoff.
Former Prime Minister Taro Aso told members in his faction to vote for the candidate who was winning the most votes among rank and file, news report said, indicating that he supported Takaichi who shares similar populist, right-wing views against Ishiba, a long-time conservative politician with a more liberal twist.