Japan: LDP elects new prime minister as instability intensifies

After only three years in power, Japan’s former Prime Minister Fumio Kishida (岸田 文雄) announced that he was resigning his post on 14 August. The resulting leadership contest for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in the end nominated ex-Defence Minister Shigeru Ishiba (石破 茂) as the country’s new Prime Minister. Now, the new PM has called a snap general election in October to consolidate his position.

Whatever the results, the ruling class of Japan will not be able to rule as before. The crisis of capitalism and the ferment among the masses deprives them of the stability upon which they’ve ruled for decades. The political establishment is entering a ‘lost decade’.

The rapid rise and fall of Fumio Kishida

Fumio Kishida came to power as the successor of Yoshihide Suga (菅 義偉), who was a caretaker leader after the former long-serving PM Shinzo Abe (安倍 晋三) resigned for health reasons. After Suga resigned after just one year and 19 days for his horrific mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, which drew ire from Japanese society, Kishida won the leadership contest with little popularity, and attempted to cement his premiership through a general election which saw an extremely low turnout. 

At the time, Marxists presented the following perspective regarding the fate of the Kishida government:

“The LDP is powerless to delay the unravelling of the Japanese capitalist crisis and the class struggles that come along with it. Kishida’s tenure will be even more fraught than that of Suga as the political status quo crumbles.”

Only three years later, this perspective has been fully confirmed.

The Kishida government – despite promising a vague departure from ‘Abenomics’ (i.e. a mixture of austerity, deficit spending, and quantitative easing) – failed to reverse further economic decline or to ameliorate the suffering of ordinary people.

The Kishida government failed to reverse further economic decline or to ameliorate the suffering of ordinary people / Image: 首相官邸ホームページ, Wikimedia Commons

The economy remains deeply stagnant, so much so that in 2023, Germany overtook Japan as the world’s third largest economy. India is on track to overtake Japan by 2025. 

Wages, too, remain stagnant. June 2024 was the only month in a 27-month period that saw a real wage rise, and even that by 1.1 percent. At the same time, the yen depreciated precipitously during Kishida’s tenure, which caused inflation in prices for food and fuel. Kishida promised a re-energised economy, but the masses got more of the same stagnation.

Not only that, Kishida completely failed to rescue the LDP from the growing anger against it as the party of stagnation, cronyism, reaction, and corruption. Throughout his tenure, scandals involving LDP politicians large and small surfaced with regularity, but two particularly large ones stood out.

The first was the revelation of the deep ties between the LDP and the Unification Church, a far-right cult with links to the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This was not necessarily news, but it sprang to the surface after former PM Shinzo Abe was assassinated in 2022 by a deeply disgruntled man who perceived Abe as a major contact of the Unification Church within the LDP. 

The ties between the LDP and the Unification Church go back as far as the 1960s, when Abe’s grandfather and former PM Nobusuke Kishi (岸 信介) created a symbiotic relationship between the party and the cult with the goal of combating communism. The Unification Church continues to be a major influencer of the upper echelons of LDP elites to this day. 

Following Abe’s assassination, the masses were angered by revelations that the Unification Church continues to have deep ties with LDP politicians. Although Kishida belongs to a rival LDP faction than that to which Abe belonged, the masses correctly drew no distinction between him and the others. They are all seen as ruling class politicians who prioritise the demands of a tiny group of oligarchs, cultists, and Yakuza criminal elements over the needs of the working class. The Kishida government’s support went into sharp decline from an already low level of support.

The straw that broke Kishida’s back was a second scandal that broke out in late 2023, regarding a corruption investigation into multiple LDP lawmakers and grandees. It was exposed that these crooks, among them four cabinet members, had been covertly moving undeclared funds raised in election campaigns into illegal slush funds for their own use. It was, in other words, good old fashioned embezzlement. 

The initial charges mostly implicated politicians from Shinzo Abe’s Seiwa Seisaku Kenkyūkai (清和政策研究会) faction, but soon extended to the faction of former LDP Secretary General Toshihiro Nikai (二階 俊博), and the faction of Kishida himself, among many others. Through this, the masses are reminded once again of the true nature of the LDP: a big tent of ruling class crooks that has dominated Japanese politics for seven decades at the expense of the working class’ interests.

Against uproar from the public, Kishida and all the other faction leaders announced the dissolution of factions in the LDP, in a desperate attempt to show that the party is capable of changing. Formally, the abolition of LDP factions will change little. These cliques, with deep roots in the establishment, won’t disappear with a simple announcement. The masses easily saw through this laughable lie and support for Kishida and the LDP continued to haemorrhage, to the point that Kishida finally had to resign in disgrace.

However, even the merely formal dissolution of factions indicates that the ruling class are acutely aware that their whole system of rule is hated and discredited.

Where bourgeois democracy exists in much of the rest of the world, the political struggles of the different factions of the ruling class are waged through different parties, through two party systems, etc. But in Japan for the past 70 years, political struggles in the ruling class have played out inside the LDP in the form of its many factions. The abandonment of this system, although only formally, shows what pressure the ruling class are under. They sense that all their factions are hated and that they cannot go on governing in the manner that they did for a whole era. That era – of a stable, one-party bourgeois democracy – has all but exhausted itself.

The emergence of Shigeru Ishiba

In the wake of Kishida’s resignation, a new leadership contest for the LDP’s Sōsai (総裁), or party president, was hurriedly held in September. To keep up the pretence that factions have ceased to exist, candidates are no longer openly nominated on a factional basis. As a result, nine politicians – a historically high number – threw their hats into the ring. 

As the candidates all stand for the same fundamental interests of the ruling class, there was no substantive difference between the nine. Distinctions between them often dwindled into tactical differences to achieve the same economic objectives; or superficial qualities, such as their age, gender, and ‘competence’. 

Ishiba comes from a political dynasty based in the deeply conservative Tottori Prefecture / Image: 首相官邸 PMO, Wikimedia Commons

In the end, former defence and agriculture Minister Shigeru Ishiba, a career politician since 1986, took the crown.

Ishiba comes from a political dynasty based in the deeply conservative Tottori Prefecture (鳥取県). He somehow created an image of having no factional affiliation and has often railed against factionalism in the LDP, even though he led his own faction and held top party positions for years. What is true is that, by his own admission, his power base among the grandees is relatively weak, which means that powerful cliques within the party would still ride roughshod over his leadership.

For the western imperialists, above all the US, Ishiba is a reliable successor to Kishida. 

Kishida loyally followed the US’ lead in ramping up the rivalry against China by increasing defence spending, sending billions of dollars and equipments to Ukraine, forging deep ties with South Korea’s hard-right Yoon Suk-yeol government against North Korea, and forming a Trilateral Secretariat with the US and South Korea, which could become the seed of a NATO-like alliance in East Asia.

Ishiba seeks to double down on these measures. One of his key ideas is to establish an “Asian version of NATO,” which he described in an essay published by the Hudson Institute as “essential to deter China by its Western allies.” Not only this, Ishiba believes that the Asian NATO “must also specifically consider America’s sharing of nuclear weapons or the introduction of nuclear weapons into the region”!

Regarding the US, Ishiba promised to “raise the Japan-US alliance to the level of the US-UK alliance,” bringing what is already a very close relationship even closer in order to deter China, Russia and North Korea.

These policies may appear sensational, but they are nothing more than further steps in what Kishida’s government had already been doing. These measures also fit neatly into the agendas of US imperialism and of the Japanese imperialist ruling class, both of whom are now eager to curb China in their inter-imperialist rivalry.

In terms of economics, Ishiba promised that “in order to realise wage rises that exceed price rises, [I will] accelerate the development of ‘new form of capitalism.’” This carries on the idea of Kishida’s so-called ‘new form of capitalism’, which departs from Abenomics in that it would shy away from ultra-loose monetary policy in favour of higher taxation, whilst claiming he would somehow ‘reduce inequality’. In practice, however, Kishida’s economic policies differed very little from Abenomics.

In terms of social policies, there was never going to be any substantive difference among the deeply conservative LDP candidates. Ishiba only distinguished himself by supporting the ‘radical’ idea of allowing married couples to keep separate surnames, which remains illegal in Japan to this day. 

Now that Ishiba has emerged as the new LDP leader, he has called a general election on 27 October to cement his position. Ishiba promises to continue what Kishida had started, but what the Japanese working class will get is more of the same stagnation and crisis that they have experienced for more than a decade. Even if he manages to somehow maintain LDP’s parliamentary majority, which remains more uncertain by the day, all the Japanese masses will get is merely the same government of bankers, bosses, and criminals, growing more aggressively militaristic in closer partnership with US imperialism.

Still no viable alternative

Ishiba’s victory seems to have slightly bumped up the LDP in the polls. According to a survey conducted by Mainichi on 30 September, it stands at 33 percent. Perhaps incredibly – but as per usual in Japan – all the major existing parties have been unable to profit from the vacuum. The same survey shows that the biggest opposition party, the Constitutional Democrats of Japan (立憲民主党, CDPJ), stand at 15 percent. The right-populist Japan Innovation Party (日本維新の会) stands at 6 percent. The only parties on the ‘Left’, the Japanese Communist Party (日本共産党, JCP) and the Reiwa Shinsengumi(れいわ新選組), each stand at 4 percent. A whopping 25 percent of people favoured no party.

Ishiba’s victory seems to have slightly bumped up the LDP in the polls / Image: 首相官邸 PMO, Wikimedia Commons

As we have explained many times before, opposition parties in Japan have remained stagnant in face of a faltering LDP because none of them present an inspiring alternative to the establishment. 

The bourgeois liberal CDPJ, other than holding socially liberal positions towards issues like allowing women to keep their maiden names after marriage or granting marriage rights to LGBT people, consistently put forward programmes that are barely distinguishable from that of the LDP. In the last general election, their economic policies were basically those of Kishida. 

This time, they will go into the election under a new party leader, former PM Yoshihiko Noda (野田佳彦), who touts his ‘experience’ as PM for less than a year and a half in 2011 and 2012, which ended in his party losing to Shinzo Abe’s LDP in a landslide. Thus far, the Noda-led CDPJ still presents no distinctive program, and primarily focuses on horse-trading with other small opposition parties to cobble together a coalition that can outnumber the LDP and its junior partner Komeito (公明党). A major difference this time is that Noda plans to turn even more to the right by wooing the smaller right-wing opposition parties, while abandoning the JCP. The CDPJ cannot distinguish itself from the LDP precisely because they belong to the same class.

On the other hand, the two parties on the ‘Left,’ Reiwa Shinsengumi and the JCP, have not been able to take advantage of the massive vacuum and anger against the establishment due to the lack of class-based, revolutionary content in their programmes. Both are stagnating, with support below 5 percent.

As such, electorally, there remains no alternative for the workers and youth of Japan. Because of this, enthusiasm for the general election in October will be low, and Ishiba and the LDP will probably hold on to power on the basis of a low election turnout, just as Kishida was elected on a mere 56 percent turnout.

A new political lost decade

No matter who takes the office, the deep crisis in society and the seething anger against the status quo will not go away. The decrepit, imperialist Japanese ruling class, tied by a thousand threads to the West, will faithfully serve the increasingly insane militarist adventures as a willing sidekick. In the process, they will drag the Japanese masses into more danger and suffering. Eventually, the masses will have to take matters into their own hands to steer their destinies away from the abyss. Turmoil in Japanese bourgeois politics will continue until capitalism is overthrown.

A glimmer of future rising struggles can be seen in this year’s Shunto (春闘, spring struggles), where the trade unions won a 4 percent wage rise from large corporations, the highest wage hike since 1992. The Financial Times reported that several strikes have occurred this year in Japan, where workers’ action has been a rarity for decades.

“Looking back, we feel that labour unions have been too reasonable,” Katahiro Yasukochi, chair of the Japanese Association of Metal, Machinery and Manufacturing Workers told the FT. Given that there is a labour shortage in Japan, the workers are playing to their strengths. “The labour shortage will never be resolved. We have entered an era where company managers who cannot raise wages will be removed from the market.” In other words, the Japanese workers are starting to feel the power in their hands.

And soon, they will draw the conclusion that the ruling class that keeps Japan in an unending succession of ‘lost decades’, both economically and politically, should be removed from power.