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After its approval ratings plummeted in the immediate aftermath of the upper house elections in July, the support for Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru’s government is the strongest it has been since June, when Ishiba was still enjoying a bump from appointing Koizumi Shinjirō as minister of agriculture, forestry and fisheries.
Five new polls conducted over the weekend – by the Yomiuri Shimbun, Fuji TV-Sankei Shimbun, Asahi TV, Kyodo News, and the Mainichi Shimbun – helped cement the upward swing in the government’s net approval rating, which in my ten-day weighted moving average has climbed from -30 on 1 August to -16 on 25 August (-27 to -13 when adjusting from pollster biases). The most impressive shift was in Yomiuri, in whose poll the government’s approval climbed seventeen points to 39% and disapproval fell by seventeen points, a thirty-four-point swing in net approval. Kyodo’s poll was not far behind, with a nearly thirty-point swing in net approval. The other polls recorded more modest but still positive swings for the Ishiba government.
