Japan's Ishiba tries to buy time after historic election setback
Ishiba on Monday vowed to remain in his job even though his LDP-led coalition finished Sunday running a government without a majority in both chambers of parliament for the first time since the party's founding seven decades ago. While it has ruled Japan for most of that period, younger voters are increasingly turning toward populist smaller parties as rising prices fuel discontent.
"The LDP is a fatigued party and it has a brand problem," said David Boling, director at the Eurasia Group covering Japan and Asia Trade, former negotiator at the USTR. "To be blunt I think many Japanese and many Japanese voters see it as a party of old men who are out of touch."
Although the outcome on Sunday wasn't as bad as some of the early exit polls suggested, Ishiba still failed to clear the low bar he set of retaining a majority in the upper house. That leaves him at risk of becoming yet another footnote in the revolving door of Japanese prime ministers that only managed to last for a year or so.
For now, Ishiba can lean into the fact that he needs to stay on to negotiate a trade deal with the U.S. to help Japan avoid a steep increase in tariffs from Donald Trump's administration. He cited those talks and other pressing issues at his briefing on Monday.
"I plan to put all of my efforts into finding a solution to the urgent issues we face, including the U.S. tariffs, inflation, natural disasters, and the most complex and severe security environment since the war," Ishiba said.
Still, it looks like his days are numbered - even if he has no obvious successor right now.
"We'll see in the next day or two if the dissenters are able to gather enough people to push him out, but this can't go on," said Tobias Harris, founder of Japan Foresight, adding that none of the opposition parties want to join a coalition with him. "It all looks like you've got a political crisis."
Harris cited four key points a replacement would need for success: bringing back right-wing voters, appealing to a younger demographic, matching Trump at the negotiation table and rebuilding a governing coalition that can win at the ballot box. Few of the familiar names in the LDP check all four boxes, he said.
The timing of any move may depend on the success of the trade talks.
Ishiba said he wanted to speak with Trump and obtain tangible results in the negotiations soon. His long-time right-hand man Ryosei Akazawa is already on his way to Washington for an eighth attempt to gain traction with his counterparts in the U.S.
Among the key sticking points is the sectoral tariff on cars and auto parts that is sending profit hit shockwaves through Japan's auto sector. Within the LDP there is already unhappiness about Ishiba's relatively neutral response to Trump's abrupt letter stipulating higher across-the-board duties of 25% from the beginning of August.
"If Ishiba has no concrete results by then the voices calling for his resignation will likely get louder," said Katsuyuki Yakushiji, professor emeritus at Toyo University and writer of multiple books on Japanese politics. He indicated that August would likely be the make-or-break month for the prime minister.
The last three LDP prime ministers who lost an upper house majority stepped down within two months, including Shinzo Abe in 2007 during his first stint as premier. Abe's departure then, may provide a rough time frame for Ishiba now. Abe lost the majority in July, tried a cabinet reshuffle in August to regain momentum then stepped down in September. That month is a common post-summer timing for the LDP to appoint and try to rally around a new leader.
At the time, Ishiba was one of the LDP's fiercest voices calling on Abe to resign unless he could justify a reason for staying on. Ishiba was reminded of this comment on Monday and said he clearly remembered asking Abe to explain himself to the public as well as the party.
Fast forward 18 years and it's Ishiba taking the heat. The same names in the news, a generation later.
The opposition gains in the election show voters are wanting something different. Ishiba is the leader the LDP chose, but he's not the choice of most members of the public. And they seek a sales tax cut to ease the pain of inflation they never asked for either.
While the Constitutional Democratic Party came second as the biggest opposition party offering to address the tax issue, many younger voters opted for the Democratic Party for the People's and its pledge of more take-home pay for working age people.
Harder conservatives drifted to Sanseito and its "Japanese First" message, though support remained highly localized around areas with high concentrations of foreigners or as a kind of protest vote in the proportional representation segment of the election.
Former Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is among the LDP members who might check a couple of the check boxes cited by Harris, while Sanae Takaichi, the policy hawk who lost out to Ishiba in last year's party shootout, might seem an obvious choice to win back right-wingers. But both would give the impression of looking at the rear-view mirror. Takaichi would likely more look like Abenomics II, than a move forward.
Instead the party should look at younger guns such as conservative former Economic Security Minister Takayuki Kobayashi or Shinjiro Koizumi, the "rice minister" whose quick action has helped cool prices of the nation's staple, according to Eurasia's Boling.
In Koizumi's case, he also inherits some reformist cache from his father Junichiro, a party maverick who helped re-brand the party a quarter century ago, something the party needs to do again now.
"I think that brand needs to be a face of a younger LDP member. Is that Kobayashi? Is that Koizumi?" said Boling. "I think it's probably more Koizumi than Kobayashi."
---------
-With assistance from Yuko Takeo.
Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


UPI
11 minutes ago
- UPI
N. Korea says Trump-Kim relationship 'not bad' but rejects nuclear talks
SEOUL, July 29 (UPI) -- The powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said Tuesday that her brother's relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump was "not bad," but dismissed the notion of resuming denuclearization talks with Washington. "I do not want to deny the fact that the personal relationship between the head of our state and the U.S. president is not bad," Kim Yo Jong said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency. "However, if the personal relations between the top leaders of the DPRK and the U.S. are to serve the purpose of denuclearization, it can be interpreted as nothing but a mockery of the other party," she said. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is the official name of North Korea. "Shortly ago, a person in authority of the White House said ... that [Trump] is still open to dialogue with the DPRK leader for achieving the complete denuclearization of the DPRK," Kim said. "Any attempt to deny the position of the DPRK as a nuclear weapons state ... will be thoroughly rejected." Kim appeared to be responding to a Yonhap news agency report Saturday that quoted an unnamed White House official as saying Trump "remains open to engaging with Leader Kim to achieve a fully denuclearized North Korea." During Trump's first term, the two leaders held a pair of high-profile summits and met briefly a third time at the DMZ. The diplomatic outreach failed to result in a nuclear deal, however, and Pyongyang has accelerated the development of its weapons programs in the intervening years. In April, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that there had been communication with North Korea and that the two sides would "probably do something at some point." "I have a very good relationship with [Kim]," Trump said. "I think it's very important. He's a big nuclear nation and he's a very smart guy." In September 2022, the North passed a law declaring itself a nuclear weapons state and giving it the right to conduct a preemptive nuclear strike in self-defense. Kim called the decision "irreversible" and later amended the country's constitution to enshrine the permanent growth of Pyongyang's nuclear arsenal. In her statement Tuesday, Kim Yo Jong said any efforts to engage with North Korea would require acknowledging "the hard fact that its capabilities and geopolitical environment have radically changed." "The recognition of the irreversible position of the DPRK as a nuclear weapons state ... should be a prerequisite for predicting and thinking everything in the future," she said. "It would be advisable to seek another way of contact on the basis of such new thinking." Kim's remarks came one day after she released a statement condemning Seoul's military alliance with Washington and saying that Pyongyang had "no interest" in efforts by the administration of South Korean President Lee Jae Myung to improve relations.


CNBC
13 minutes ago
- CNBC
CNBC Daily Open: Investors are signaling it's time for tariffs to move aside
Stock markets in the U.S. and Europe didn't seem that delighted with the U.S.-European Union trade deal reached over the weekend. The S&P 500 ticked up, but by the barest margin, while the Stoxx Europe 600 fell. Both indexes were trading higher during their respective sessions but had given up those gains as the day ended. For those on the continent, perhaps there was a dawning realization that the agreement wasn't too much in their favor. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he would have welcomed further easing of trade, while France's minister for Europe, Benjamin Haddad, said the deal was "unbalanced," according to a Google translation. With U.S. President Donald Trump announcing Monday that he would probably impose a blanket tariff of between 15% and 20% on countries without trade agreements, it's starting to seem like most duties will settle around that level eventually, easing some uncertainty. What's more, economists appear to be revising downward their expectations of the impact tariffs will have on the U.S. economy — so any deals in the future might not trigger rallies, or strong ones at least, on Wall Street. Tariff considerations, then, are on the backburner for now. Investors can turn their attention to Magnificent Seven earnings and data on the U.S. economy coming out the next few days. If all goes well, they might give markets the cheer that was missing on Monday. Global baseline tariff of between 15% and20%. For countries that have not negotiated separate trade agreements with the U.S., Trump said he would likely impose that blanket tariff rate on their exports. But Wall Street doesn't seem as frightened of tariffs anymore. Less than two weeks for Russia to reach a peace deal with Ukraine. That's the new deadline Trump issued to Moscow — if Russia fails to meet it, the U.S. president will implement massive "secondary tariffs" on the country's trade partners, Trump said. India has exported more smartphones to the U.S. than China. In the second quarter, 44% of U.S. smartphone imports were assembled in India, while 25% were from China, according to research firm Canalys. India's and China's share a year earlier were 13% and 61%, respectively. A muted response to the EU deal. On Monday, the S&P 500 closed mostly flat, giving up earlier gains. Asia-Pacific markets fell Tuesday. Shares of Singapore Airlines lost as much as 8% after the carrier reported a 59% slump in profit for its fiscal first quarter. [PRO] Watch this index for signs of a new bull phase. This index, which is calculated differently from the price-weighted S&P 500, gives a better gauge of the health of the entire economy and stock market. China's latest AI model claims to be even cheaper to use than DeepSeek Chinese startup formerly known as Zhipu, announced Monday that its new GLM-4.5 AI model would cost less than DeepSeek to use. At about half the size of DeepSeek's model, GLM-4.5 only needs eight Nvidia H20 chips to operate, CEO Zhang Peng told CNBC on Monday. In late June, OpenAI named Zhipu in a warning about Chinese artificial intelligence progress. The U.S. has also added the startup to its entity list that restricts American companies from doing business with it. —

Wall Street Journal
13 minutes ago
- Wall Street Journal
Stellantis Reinstates Guidance, Expects Second-Half Rebound Despite Tariffs
Stellantis STLA -4.24%decrease; red down pointing triangle reinstated financial guidance for the year, saying it expects to report a sequential improvement in revenue and profitability in the second half of the year. The carmaker had suspended its full-year guidance in April as it became difficult to predict the impact of President Trump's 25% tariffs on market volumes and the competitive landscape and has been working to improve sourcing opportunities and cut production.