Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Japan’s Prime Minister Will Step Aside After Just a Year in Office

Yoshihide Suga’s abrupt decision came after he had spent days trying to salvage a historically unpopular administration.

The approval ratings of Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s prime minister, plunged over the summer amid public dissatisfaction with his administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the Olympics.Credit...Pool photo by Toru Hanai

TOKYO — Less than a year after becoming prime minister of Japan, Yoshihide Suga said on Friday that he would not seek re-election as the head of its governing party, raising the prospect of a return to the revolving-door leadership that once characterized the top office of the world’s third-largest economy.

Mr. Suga, 72, assumed the prime ministership after Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, resigned in August 2020 because of ill health. But Japan’s struggles with the coronavirus left Mr. Suga deeply unpopular, and his decision on Friday makes him a rare leader of a large, developed country to resign in large part because of the pandemic.

The son of a strawberry farmer and a schoolteacher from the country’s rural north, Mr. Suga had been a behind-the-scenes operator in the governing Liberal Democratic Party, which has dominated Japanese politics for decades. A deeply uncharismatic leader who struggled to connect with the public, he often looked uncomfortable as a public-facing leader.

In the end — with coronavirus cases hitting record highs, hospitals turning away patients and a vaccination campaign still straining to catch up with other rich countries — he apparently decided he had no viable path to remaining prime minister.

The winner of a party leadership race that begins on Sept. 17 will most likely be designated prime minister by Japan’s Parliament and then lead the party into a general election that must be held by late next month.

Mr. Suga’s early departure threatens to push Japan back into the leadership instability that marked the period before Mr. Abe’s nearly eight consecutive years in power. During that time, the country churned through six prime ministers in six years, including an earlier stint by Mr. Abe himself.

Image
At a hospital in Sapporo last month. Rising coronavirus cases have strained Japan’s health system.Credit...Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

With the same party almost assured to remain in power, Japan’s policies on the economy, trade, international relations and other matters are unlikely to change. But uncertain leadership raises doubts about Tokyo’s ability to carry out its promises.

At a hastily convened news conference Friday afternoon, Mr. Suga said he wanted to focus on managing the pandemic rather than running a re-election campaign. With the party leadership contest approaching, he said, “I realized that I need enormous energy.”

“I cannot do both,” he said. “I have to choose one.”

In the days before his surprise announcement, Mr. Suga appeared to be trying to salvage his leadership. When a rival, the former foreign minister Fumio Kishida, announced last month that he would stand for the party leadership, rumors circulated that Mr. Suga might dissolve Parliament early and call a general election in a last-ditch effort to retain his position. He had also suggested that he would reshuffle his cabinet and other leadership positions within the party.

The race to replace Mr. Suga as party leader culminates in a vote on Sept. 29, and so far appears relatively open.

Mr. Kishida, the former foreign minister, was the only declared candidate this week, though a former communications minister, Sanae Takaichi — who was one of the few female members of Mr. Abe’s cabinet — has expressed interest. A few hours after Mr. Suga made his announcement, Taro Kono, a more liberal-leaning iconoclast who has served as foreign and defense minister and has more recently led the vaccine rollout, said he was consulting with allies about whether to run.

The Liberal Democrats have held power in Japan for almost the entire postwar era, and the political opposition has been in disarray for the past decade, after being blamed for a mismanaged response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The Liberal Democrats, while an overwhelming favorite to retain power, may still be seeking a strategic advantage by installing a new prime minister in the weeks before the general election.

Image
Fumio Kishida, a former foreign minister, was initially the only declared candidate to succeed Mr. Suga.Credit...Charly Triballeau/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/Afp Via Getty Images

The opposition “will have a harder time running against someone who is maybe enjoying a honeymoon and looks new and fresh and promising change that makes people feel a little more optimistic,” said Tobias Harris, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington and a specialist in Japanese politics.

While Japan has been plagued by revolving-door leadership in the past, complicating efforts to tackle entrenched economic and demographic problems, Mr. Suga’s increasingly desperate scramble to keep his job was without recent precedent, analysts said.

“I can’t quite recall this degree of confusion,” said Koichi Nakano, a political scientist at Sophia University in Tokyo. “I think he was really struggling and feeling isolated, and his desperate attempts to cling to power backfired one after another,” he added.

In many respects, Mr. Suga’s quick rise and fall could be attributed to timing. When Mr. Abe resigned, the party bosses decided they did not want a bruising leadership contest and quickly aligned behind Mr. Suga, a power broker and chief spokesman for Mr. Abe who was perceived as malleable and willing to carry on his predecessor’s policies.

Although Mr. Kishida also ran in the leadership election last fall, the party anointed Mr. Suga in what was largely seen as a rubber-stamp vote.

But public frustrations with Mr. Suga grew as Japan, which had managed the pandemic quite well in 2020, took months to ramp up its vaccination program and left the population weary with continued economic restrictions. Concerns that the government was plowing ahead with the Olympics as cases rose in Tokyo and surrounding prefectures also damaged Mr. Suga’s credibility.

By early last month, Mr. Suga’s approval ratings, which were above 60 percent at the beginning of the year, had plunged below 30 percent.

With his difficulty connecting with the public, Mr. Suga shouldered the blame for the broader failings of the Japanese bureaucracy, which held up vaccinations with requirements for domestic clinical testing and limits on who could administer the vaccines.

Image
A street in Tokyo in July. Public frustrations with Mr. Suga grew as Japan took months to ramp up its vaccination program and left the population weary with continued economic restrictions.Credit...Yuichi Yamazaki/Getty Images

“His communication with the public was not very effective,” said Sheila A. Smith, a senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

Mr. Suga also embodied a larger, deep-seated challenge facing Japan’s government, Ms. Smith said. “When you have a crisis, you need an adaptable, break-all-the-rules, get-things-done kind of response, and that is a little harder for Japan,” she said.

Perhaps most critically, Mr. Suga, who once had the support of the party’s bosses in its factional governing system — including Mr. Abe, who still wields influence behind the scenes — appeared to have lost his backers.

The current term of the House of Representatives is scheduled to expire next month, which would oblige the party to call a general election by no later than Oct. 21. But the new leader could dissolve Parliament before the term expires, which would allow a general election to be postponed until late November.

Despite widespread dissatisfaction with the government’s response to the pandemic, political analysts say it will be tough for any opposition party to unseat the Liberal Democrats.

“I am sure many frustrated people really wanted to vote for another party or representatives who may do better,” said Tsuneo Watanabe, a senior fellow at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation in Tokyo. “But at this moment, there is no strong alternative to the L.D.P., and that is a failure of the Japanese political system.”

Makiko Inoue contributed reporting.

Motoko Rich is the Tokyo bureau chief, where she covers Japanese politics, society, gender and the arts, as well as news and features on the Korean peninsula. She has covered a broad range of beats at The Times, including real estate, the economy, books and education. More about Motoko Rich

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: After One Bruising Year, Japan’s Prime Minister Will Step Down. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT