The LDP's right wing stirs
Ishiba faces right-wing attacks on multiple fronts, creating another headache for his premiership
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In the immediate aftermath of the Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) defeat in last year’s general election, Takaichi Sanae, in a meeting with a group of lawmakers who backed her losing bid for the party’s leadership, called for unity. “If there is grumbling within the party,” she said, “The LDP will end up in opposition.”
It was only a matter of time – conservatives emerged from the LDP leadership election furious over Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru’s narrow come-from-behind victory over Takaichi in the runoff – but the truce, it seems, is over. As discussed here, there are genuine philosophical differences between Ishiba and his right-wing rivals that cannot be easily papered over.
The LDP’s conservatives are pressuring the Ishiba government on three fronts.
First, they are calling for the party to oppose legislation being prepared by the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP) and other parties for the current Diet session that will revise the civil code to allow spouses to have separate surnames. Ishiba has avoided saying he will support the reform, but said in the Diet last week that the issue “cannot be postponed indefinitely” and wants to reach some sort of consensus within the LDP. The LDP’s right wing has prevented progress on this issue for decades, but now, with the ruling parties lacking a majority in the lower house – and Kōmeitō favorably disposed to reform – the right wing is raising the pressure on Ishiba to resist and is pushing instead for a softer proposal that would expand the use of previous surnames as nicknames while still requiring spouses to have the same surname, arguing that allowing spouses to have separate surnames will introduce conflict and confusion into family life.
At a meeting of the Conservative Unity Society on Tuesday, 4 February, Takaichi and nineteen allies met to discuss this alternative. Kobayashi Takayuki, the other prominent conservative candidate in last year’s leadership election, first voiced his opposition to tackling this issue at all when there are more urgent priorities and then expressed his opposition to a suggestion from LDP Secretary-General Moriyama Hiroshi that the party should treat a vote on this issue as a conscience vote, sidestepping the need for a binding party consensus.
Whether the right wing is able to stop the reform this time is unclear – they may simply be outnumbered – but in the meantime their opposition puts Ishiba in an uncomfortable position. It puts him on the wrong side of public opinion (the reform has been consistently favored by sizable majorities) and at odds with Kōmeitō, which not only supports reform, but wants the ruling parties to forge a common position that would enable the government to approve and submit a reform bill. In an interview with the Asahi Shimbun, Kōmeitō leader Saitō Tetsuo said the party would not be okay with the right wing’s alternative proposal, said that if the two parties could not reach an agreement his party would consider alternative approaches, and did not deny the possibility that Kōmeitō could leave the coalition. Whether or not Saitō is bluffing, if Kōmeitō were to quit, it would be a catastrophic blow to the Ishiba government, which would in a stroke lose control of the upper house. In short, the stakes of the surname issue could be far reaching, and the right wing’s mobilization around it is an ill omen for the prime minister.
Second, LDP conservatives have been waging an increasingly fervent campaign against Foreign Minister Iwaya Takeshi and, by extension, the Ishiba government’s China policy more broadly. The immediate trigger was Iwaya’s decision to enable Chinese nationals to receive a multiple-entry tourism visa valid for ten years following his visit to Beijing in December. While some of the furor is procedural – the LDP’s foreign affairs committee has complained that they were not consulted in advance of Iwaya’s concession1 – it is increasingly clear that its objections to Iwaya’s diplomacy with China have little to do with norms and procedures and a lot to do with what they perceive as Ishiba’s overly accommodationist approach to Beijing, as in his policy speech last month.
Iwaya may be an easier target for the right wing than the prime minister himself, and the right wing may be mobilizing to press for Iwaya’s removal. A Change.org petition calling for his removal received more than 30,000 signatures, earning a mention from CDP lawmaker Ōnishi Kensuke on Tuesday, who questioned the visa concession in the face of public doubts about over-tourism (as well as China’s actions in other areas). LDP lawmakers from the foreign affairs committee and other policy committees also met with Iwaya at the Foreign Ministry on Tuesday to deliver a statement expressing the party’s disappointment in the foreign minister. They will also work to delay a reciprocal visit to Japan by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and block the state visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping that has been indefinitely postponed since 2020.
As the latter suggests, the goal is to prevent what Sankei columnist Abiru Rui characterized as a “Hatoyama-like” approach of balancing between the United States and China. In going after Iwaya, they are sending a signal not only to the prime minister but also to any other senior politician who would consider anything other than a hardline approach to Beijing.2
Finally, and related to their objections to Ishiba’s China policy, they have raised doubts about Prime Minister Ishiba’s ability to handle diplomacy with US President Donald Trump, doubts that also extend to Iwaya. Right-wing media outlets are closely scrutinizing everything Ishiba, his cabinet ministers, and his advisers say about Trump, the US-Japan relationship, and foreign policy, questioning whether Ishiba is sabotaging the relationship whether through his maladroitness, his hostility to the late Abe Shinzō, or a genuine opposition to the United States. In this sense, conservatives have lambasted Iwaya and Ishiba for their diplomatic outreach to China before Ishiba was even able to get a meeting with Trump, practically begging for gaiatsu from Trump that will help block Ishiba’s approach to China. As right-wing commentator Sakurai Yoshiko said in an interview in the final issue of the Yūkan Fuji, the right-wing tabloid, “Prime Minister Ishiba is hopeless, and Foreign Minister Iwaya Takeshi is also hopeless. Every day they are harming Japan’s national interests, so the best thing for Japan’s national interests is for them to be stopped as soon as possible.” Their fault, Sakurai said, is that they have “fallen into China’s trap.” “During Prime Minister Abe's time,” she said, “relations with the U.S. were of the utmost importance, but now it appears that relations with China come first, and relations with the US are being used as an alibi.” Sakurai undoubtedly speaks for many – including within the LDP – in voicing this opinion. At a basic level, they do not trust Ishiba with Japan’s foreign relations at a challenging moment.
Of course, just because conservatives are mobilizing against Ishiba on multiple fronts does not mean that they will be able to unseat him or that one of their own – say Takaichi or Kobayashi – is guaranteed to replace him. The bar to unseat an LDP leader is extraordinarily high, requiring a majority of LDP lawmakers in both houses plus representatives of the forty-seven prefectural chapters to agree to an early leadership election. It is far from certain that conservatives would even unite behind Takaichi, as opposed to Kobayashi or even more mainstream figures like former LDP secretary-general Motegi Toshimitsu (whose new study group attracted sixty participants, including Hagiuda Kōichi) or Finance Minister Katō Katsunobu, who was exceptionally close with Abe and whose lack of name recognition would be less of a liability in an emergency election to select a new leader, in which rank-and-file supporters would not participate. But the LDP’s right wing is clearly able and now increasingly willing to inflict political costs on the prime minister by highlighting his missteps and stymieing his agenda, adding another complication to Ishiba’s efforts to stay in power.
The right wing has previously given Chief Cabinet Secretary Hayashi Yoshimasa and former leadership candidate Kōno Tarō this treatment.