Shigeru Ishiba was meant to turn things around for the Liberal Democratic Party. Instead, he has overseen its worst showing in years, says Bloomberg Opinion’s Gearoid Reidy.
Japan ese Prime Minister and leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party Shigeru Ishiba arrives for a press conference a day after Japan 's lower house election, at the party's headquarters in Tokyo, Japan , Oct 28, 2024. TOKYO: In US politics, a Scaramucci has come to mean a unit of time lasting around 10 days, the length of Anthony Scaramucci’s term as White House director of communications.
After years of relative stability, Japanese politics is about to enter a shaky period. The prospect of rainbow coalition governments and a return to short-term prime ministers seems a distinct possibility. First, he alienated conservatives within the LDP. The Abe faction might have deserved a bloody nose for its slush-fund issues. But the LDP is fundamentally a centre-right organisation, and Ishiba offered no olive branch to the party’s conservative wing.
And having hinted he was in no rush to call an election if he won the race to be leader, he not only backtracked, but also didn’t follow standard operating procedure and wait for data to confirm his popularity in opinion polls . Add to this a series of gaffes – like his reference to the “nightmare” government of the 2009-2012 opposition, an expression Ishiba himself criticised Abe for using in the past – and his struggles to draw a line under the slush fund scandal, and it’s clear he was floundering.Even so, the scale of the trouncing is stunning. What happens next isn’t yet so obvious.
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