The public is in wait-and-see mode
The Ishiba government's approval ratings are some of the lowest for a new government over the past two decades
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The Ishiba government’s first approval ratings have landed, and the results are, frankly, middling.
A weighted average of the four new polls conducted 1 October to 2 October – from the Asahi Shimbun, Yomiuri Shimbun, Kyodo News, and the Nikkei Shimbun – shows an average approval rating of 49.5 percent and an average disapproval of 31.55 percent.1 These are certainly better than the Kishida government’s ratings, but Ishiba Shigeru’s new government received some of the lowest approval ratings for a new government since 2006, in some polls the worst, in others only slightly better than Asō Tarō’s new government in 2008.
This is a problem for Ishiba, since ultimately his position at the top of the LDP will depend on his ability to demonstrate that he can be a “people’s prime minister” who will bring voters back to the party after the kickback scandal (and Unification Church scandal) frayed the public’s trust in the LDP.
To be sure, it is not all gloomy for Ishiba. Ishiba’s personal popularity may well be an asset for his government. In Asahi’s poll, for example, among the forty-six percent who said that they support the government, twenty-five percent said that their reason for supporting the government is Ishiba himself, second only to the forty-two percent who said “because it is better than the alternatives.”2 There was a similar finding in the Nikkei poll. The Ishiba cabinet’s approval rating in Nikkei was only fifty-one percent, the lowest since the newspaper introduced its current method of polling in 2002.3 Of the reasons for supporting the government, however, forty-nine percent of respondents said it was because they have confidence in the personality of the prime minister. (Ishiba may, in fact, be more popular than his cabinet and party leadership team, which received only thirty-two percent approval versus forty-four percent disapproval in Nikkei.)
The new polls suggest that the public is looking for the new government to take political reform seriously and make more than a rhetorical commitment to cleaner politics. In Asahi, seventy-five percent said that Ishiba should do more to reveal the facts about the factions’ slush funds; seventy percent said that he should do more to reveal the facts about the LDP’s relationship with the former Unification Church. In Kyodo’s poll, seventy-three percent of respondents said that Ishiba’s inauguration as prime minister would not help resolve the “money and politics” issue, while 22.8 percent said that it would. The same poll found that 75.6 percent of respondents “cannot understand” why the LDP lawmakers implicated in the slush fund scandal should receive their party’s endorsement in the next general election.
In short, Ishiba’s election alone has not healed the wound that the LDP’s scandals have inflicted upon itself. It may be the case that voters are taking a wait-and-see attitude towards the new government, which perhaps explains why in Asahi’s poll twenty-four percent said that they could not say whether they supported the Ishiba government. It also suggests that the LDP itself still has work to do to win back the public. Although the party’s approval ratings have regained some of the ground lost this year – in Asahi, its support rose five points to thirty-three percent, while the share of independents fell six points to forty-two percent, for example – the party’s support is still relatively weaker than in the past. Meanwhile, the public’s voting intentions for the general election also favor the LDP and polls show that the public prefers an LDP-led government after the general election versus an opposition-led government by a substantial margin, reversing the narrowing gap between these figures earlier this year.
However, this does not exclude the possibility of significant and damaging losses in the 27 October general election, particularly if the opposition parties concentrate their attention on scandal-implicated incumbents. The LDP currently has a twenty-five-seat majority in the House of Representatives; the ruling coalition, a fifty-seven-seat majority. More than a handful of losses could significantly weaken Ishiba’s position. And polls show that thus far, Noda Yoshihiko has not been a liability for the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP), which has generally held steady in the polls since he won the leadership election. In Nikkei, fifty-one percent of respondents said that they have hopes for Noda, compared with forty-one percent who said they do not. The equivalent figures in Kyodo and Yomiuri are 50.4 percent and 44.4 percent and forty-nine percent and forty-one percent respectively.
The upshot is that Ishiba is taking a considerable gamble in calling a snap election faster than any newly inaugurated prime minister has before. While he may have disrupted Noda’s efforts to achieve a broader united front with other opposition parties, he has also placed himself in a vulnerable position, leaving himself just under four weeks to convince voters that he will make a sincere effort to grapple with the LDP’s political failings in a way that his predecessor could not. It will not be enough to win back public trust simply by presenting voters with the cleaner-seeming Ishiba. They want him to act.
With the start of the new government, I am restarting my weight moving-average of Japanese opinion polling, which I used to do when I was a senior fellow at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA. Substack does not make it easy to embed a dynamic chart, but if I can figure out a solution I will embed a dynamic chart that will be updated periodically.
This is a fairly typical number.
By comparison, Kishida Fumio started with fifty-nine percent. The record-high is Hatoyama Yukio’s seventy-five percent in 2009.