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Japan gears up for ‘wild west’ leadership race

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Japan gears up for ‘wild west’ leadership race

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A record number of candidates are vying to become Japan’s next prime minister, as the country confronts rising prices, escalating tensions in the Pacific and uncertainties surrounding a possible second Donald Trump presidency in the US.

The contest for the leadership of the Liberal Democratic party — which has ruled Japan for all but a few years of the postwar period — followed incumbent Fumio Kishida’s decision last month to resign after three years as he battled low approval ratings and public dismay over the state of the economy.

The unusually wide-open race kicks off on Thursday with an unprecedented nine candidates and could crown Japan’s youngest-ever prime minister or its first female leader when it concludes on September 27.

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The size of the field attests to upheaval within the ruling bloc, analysts said, as the LDP searches for a standard-bearer who can plausibly lead the party into a general election that must be called by the end of October 2025.

“This first round will be the wild west. There are candidates that are running who know they don’t have a shot,” said Tobias Harris, the founder of political risk advisory firm Japan Foresight. “It is also an election where people who have the strongest CVs do not necessarily advance.”

The candidates include the arch-conservative former economic security minister Sanae Takaichi who has cited Margaret Thatcher as a role model; former foreign minister Toshimitsu Motegi who has been dubbed “Japan’s Trump whisperer”; outspoken former defence and foreign minister Taro Kono, who began his current stint as digital minister by declaring a war on floppy discs; and Yoko Kamikawa, the current foreign minister who ordered 16 executions during her time as justice minister.

The early favourites, according to political analysts and media polls, are former defence minister Shigeru Ishiba and Shinjiro Koizumi, the 43-year-old son of one of Japan’s most charismatic but controversial leaders, Junichiro Koizumi, who pushed Post Office privatisation and other reforms in the early 2000s.

Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s economic security minister © Toru Hanai/Bloomberg

The frontrunners face significant resistance: Koizumi because of his inexperience, and Ishiba from political enemies he has accumulated over his long career and repeated attempts to secure the LDP leadership. Senior party figures said Koizumi’s youth could also prove an advantage, as the LDP’s elite saw greater opportunity to influence his administration.

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Whoever succeeds Kishida will face a vexing economic backdrop. While Japan is exiting decades of low growth and deflation, price rises combined with a weaker yen have weighed on household finances, while the Bank of Japan’s introductory interest rates rises last month spurred a bout of extreme market volatility.

Tokyo has also taken on a more assertive security role in the Pacific, raising defence spending and deepening co-operation with the US and other regional allies such as South Korea in the face of more hostile Chinese conduct — tensions that could be further inflamed during a second Trump term.

The leadership contest will initially be decided by a combination of LDP parliamentarians and about 1mn rank-and-file party members. If no clear winner emerges, a second round of voting, only by MPs, will choose between the two leading candidates.

At the core of the race is public exhaustion after 12 years of LDP politics, including disappointment with the “Abenomics” reforms of the country’s longest-serving prime minister, Shinzo Abe, according to analysts.

While polls suggest that Japan’s main opposition party, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, poses little electoral threat, people close to the LDP leadership said it was looking for a figure to reinvigorate the party as a force of energy and renewal. “Is there someone in the field who can make people forget their exhaustion with this government?” said Harris of the LDP’s thinking.

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The contests will also be particularly unpredictable, political analysts said, because the party’s traditional selection mechanisms — factions controlled by influential supremos — are disintegrating in the wake of a political funding scandal.

The factions were officially disbanded under Kishida in an attempt to publicly atone for revelations of large slush funds. But in doing so the LDP eliminated an organisational force that previously winnowed the field of aspirants.

Without factions marshalling votes, ambitious candidates have been freer than at any time in the past to canvass for parliament members’ endorsements.

“The iron control of the factions is no longer there and so people within the party see this as their big chance,” said Jeff Kingston, a political scientist at Temple University. “Right now in the LDP, if you have ambitions and think you’ve earned it, you throw your hat in the ring.”

Yu Uchiyama, a political scientist at the University of Tokyo, noted that apart from divisions on issues such as the budget deficit or gender equality, none of the leading candidates had put forward a distinctive agenda or ideology, with a narrow range of positions on foreign policy and regional security.

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Uchiyama added that the weakened factions were likely to be a temporary phenomenon. He predicted that a second round of voting by MPs would see clusters forming that resembled the old factions.

“Lots of times when the LDP declared the factions were gone, they revived,” said Uchiyama.

Others see the contest as a sign of malaise in Japanese politics as a result of the LDP’s dominant hold on the political landscape. 

“As always, the LDP leadership contest is a scam,” said Koichi Nakano, a political scientist and affiliate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. “It is a pretence that Japan gets its leaders through a democratic process, but the reality is that leaders are chosen for the country through a very narrow and tightly controlled system.”

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Biden has become a scapegoat for the Democrats

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Biden has become a scapegoat for the Democrats

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Original Sin is an odd name for a book that turns out to cover 2023 to 2024. It implies that readers will be taken to the ultimate root of a problem — the problem being that Donald Trump is in the White House — when in fact the authors lead them along the trail of blame no more than two years back. That was when an aged Joe Biden resolved to run for president again. It was a heinous decision. The cover-up of his fragile state was worse. Peers who didn’t call on him to go until a televised debate exposed him last summer must reflect on their dereliction.

But this wasn’t the “origin” of anything. Biden has become a scapegoat for a much longer-standing Democratic problem, which is a tolerance of probable and often proven election losers.

If there was a sin, a Fall, it was the Democrats’ choice of Hillary Clinton as their presidential candidate in 2016. World history turned on that singular act of pigheadedness. Polls were telling the party that voters disliked her. She had already fluffed a huge lead over the young Barack Obama in the primaries of eight years earlier. True, her low reputation has never been fair. She isn’t a crook or much more of a hypocrite than other politicians, just one of life’s plodders. But the world is what it is. Democrats chose to ignore the objective fact of her unpopularity, and the outcome is a Trump era that was probably avoidable.

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The other event that led us to where we are today was the elevation of Kamala Harris as Biden’s running mate in 2020. Given his age, the Democrats were all but naming a future president. Again, they were spoilt for clues about her limitations. She had been the first candidate of note to withdraw from the primaries. Those who outlasted her included the mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city.

Biden carries nominal blame for choosing her as running mate, but “choice” is a misleading word here. There was a tacit Democratic rule that a white man couldn’t run with another white man. So no Pete Buttigieg. The Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar was a strong performer but also caught up in the recent history and politics of the state in which George Floyd had just been killed, which all but ruled her out. Is there another party that boxes itself in like this?

All in all, Biden’s refusal to stand down in good time comes third in the list of Democratic follies over the past decade. The problem isn’t one man. The problem is a pattern of collective delusion about candidates that goes back to the previous century. Look at margins of defeat. Not since Barry Goldwater have the Republicans misjudged the fit of nominee and electorate quite as badly as the Democrats did with George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.

In the 50-50 nation of today, the Democrats are always competitive. As a result, it is easy to miss the stunning narrowness of their candidates. Tim Walz was the first person on either the upper or lower half of a Democratic presidential ticket since 1980 who hadn’t gone to law school. There has been no southerner on the top since Al Gore at the turn of the millennium, despite the mistrust that Democrats must overcome there. Last November, in a contest that it rightly described as existential for the constitution, the party put up a pair from California (which hasn’t voted Republican since the 1980s) and Minnesota (which didn’t even vote Republican in the 1980s). This is a party that is always willing to meet conservative-minded swing voters one-tenth of the way.

To be bad at choosing a leader is to be bad at politics. Whatever else seems to matter in that trade, such as ideas and tactics, it flows from the paramount individual in a party. Good leaders will tend to get these things right. The likes of Harris, or Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, reliably won’t. If this logic seems circular — “winners win” — I’m afraid that is politics. There should be more research and commentary on what constitutes “it”, otherwise known as the X-factor, than on campaigns, manifestos and other outputs of politics, the study of which is an exercise in looking through a telescope from the wrong end.

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The question is why the Democrats in particular so often err at leadership selection. Perhaps parties of the left are necessarily softer on human weakness. The impulse that leads them to protect people without lucrative skills from market forces (a good thing) is the impulse that makes them coddle electoral no-hopers (a bad thing). That would explain why Labour in the UK has so often had the same problem: for each Dukakis, a Kinnock.

Or it might be that progressives, trained to think in terms of structural forces, regard an emphasis on individual talent as unintellectual. Increasingly, a Democrat is someone who pins the rise of Trump on academic abstractions — neoliberalism, oligarchy — but shirks the humdrum work of not choosing a great clucking turkey of a candidate every four years.

Either way, this problem predates and could postdate the Biden years. Even had he quit earlier, the Democrats would in all likelihood still have chosen Harris out of deference to seniority and those unwritten identity norms. With a longer campaign, and therefore more exposure of her mystifying syntax and opaque beliefs, I think she would have done even worse against Trump than she did. Original Sin exposes senior Democrats as people of titanic self-pity. “We got so screwed by Biden as a party,” says one grandee. “We got so screwed by the party as a world,” mumbled one reader.

janan.ganesh@ft.com

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Trump’s Higher Steel Tariffs Sour Mood at Deal-Making Table

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Trump’s Higher Steel Tariffs Sour Mood at Deal-Making Table
President Donald Trump’s doubling of US tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to 50% is fanning trade tensions at a time when Washington is negotiating with several economies that also face his so-called “reciprocal” duties set to kick in July 9.
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Elon Musk derides Donald Trump’s tax bill as ‘a disgusting abomination’

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Elon Musk derides Donald Trump’s tax bill as ‘a disgusting abomination’

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Elon Musk has lambasted Donald Trump’s signature tax bill, calling it “a disgusting abomination”, in an outburst that threatens to destroy the relationship between the US president and his billionaire backer.

In a series of posts on his social media site X on Tuesday, Musk, who abruptly left the administration last week, hit out at what he called a “massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill”.

He added: “Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”

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Musk’s comments came just hours after Trump had criticised Republican Senator Rand Paul, a staunch fiscal conservative, for his opposition to the proposed legislation, which the president described as a “BIG GROWTH BILL” on his social media platform.

The legislation, which Trump had coined his “big, beautiful bill”, passed the House last month by one vote and is currently being considered by the Senate. It has been criticised by fiscal hawks for adding trillions to the national debt when investors are already worried about the US’s widening deficit.

Supporters of Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) have also criticised the bill, claiming it would undo some of the initiative’s savings.

Asked about Musk’s latest comments, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “Look, the president already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill. It doesn’t change the president’s opinion. This is one big, beautiful bill, and he’s sticking to it.”

This is a developing story

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