Shigeru Ishiba, a veteran moderate, will next week be installed as Japan’s prime minister after he was elected leader of the governing Liberal Democratic party (LDP).
The 67-year-old, a former defence minister, beat his rightwing rival Sanae Takaichi, who was attempting to become the country’s first female prime minister, by 215 votes to 194 in a runoff election at the LDP headquarters in Tokyo on Friday.
The vote was triggered when the outgoing prime minister, Fumio Kishida, announced he would not seek re-election as LDP president amid damaging fundraising scandals and low approval ratings.
Citing the need for new blood after a bruising few months for his party, Kishida had said that his successor must lead a “new LDP”.
In brief comments to lawmakers before the runoff, Ishiba, who had described the contest as his “final political battle”, called for a fairer and kinder Japan.
“We will put an end to the widespread distrust in the LDP,” he said. “Once the election is over, we will put our hearts into protecting Japan, local areas, rules and the people of Japan.”
Despite his popularity among the public, another candidate, Shinjiro Koizumi, who at 43 would have become Japan’s youngest postwar prime minister, was knocked out of the race in the first round of voting, along with six others.
Koizumi, the son of the former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, may have spooked the party with a promise to hold a snap election if elected leader.
Having been chosen to steer the party out of the doldrums, Ishiba must address growing anger over rising living costs and navigate a volatile regional security environment fuelled by an increasingly assertive China and nuclear-armed North Korea.
A defence expert who builds plastic models of warplanes and ships in his free time, Ishiba has proposed an Asian version of Nato and voiced strong support for Taiwanese democracy. He has also called for the creation of a disaster-management agency in a country that is often struck by powerful earthquakes and typhoons.
The result has dealt a significant blow to the political legacy of the assassinated former leader Shinzo Abe, with whom Ishiba often disagreed. Takaichi was a disciple of Abe’s economic programme and shared his revisionist views on Japan’s wartime history.
Tobias Harris, the founder of the Japan Foresight political risk advisory firm, described the race as “a battle for the soul of the LDP, pitting Takaichi, Abe’s intellectual successor on economic and foreign policy, against Ishiba, an idealistic reformer who fundamentally rejects not just Abenomics but much of his foreign policy thinking and his approach to politics”.
Takaichi’s stock had risen in the years since her first unsuccessful bid for the LDP leadership in 2021 – a contest won by Kishida. She attempted to fill the ideological vacuum left by Abe’s violent death in 2022, and benefited in Friday’s vote from securing the support of Taro Aso, an influential former prime minister.
But the wait for Japan’s first female prime minister continues. Women comprise just 10.3% of the lower house of parliament, ranking 163rd for female representation among 190 countries in a report by the Geneva-based Inter-Parliamentary Union in April.
Agencies contributed to this report