“It’s not good for Japanese foreign policy,” says Tomohiko Satake, an associate professor at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, referring to the leadership rotations.
“In order to maintain a stable foreign security posture, we need strong leadership. Ishiba has been pretty much domestic-focused rather than foreign-policy oriented, although he knows military things very well.”
It also poses another setback for the beleaguered Quad security dialogue between the US, Australia, Japan and India, which was created to counter China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific region. A meeting between the four countries’ leaders, loosely flagged to be held in Delhi this year – but already under question due to the Trump administration’s 50 per cent tariff on Indian goods – is now increasingly unlikely given the uncertainty over who will take the reins in Tokyo.
“Japan is not going to play any role in driving the Quad apart, but if it doesn’t have stable leadership, it won’t be able to play much of a role in trying to bring it together,” says Jeffrey Hall, a lecturer at Japan’s Kanda University of International Studies.
“Abe was on very good terms with Modi. There is no other Japanese politician who has that relationship with India.”
More broadly, on the international circuit, Ishiba’s successor “might be seen as just another unpopular Japanese prime minister who’s probably going to be going away very soon. So why even bother caring about what exactly they think?” Hall says.
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Ishiba was forced to fall on his sword after the LDP, which has governed Japan for almost all the post-World War II period, suffered heavy electoral losses on his watch. At a snap general election after he secured the leadership in October, the LDP was plunged into minority government when it lost control of the lower house, and in July it suffered a historic defeat in the upper house elections.
Domestically, Ishiba had been trying to reverse the country’s economic malaise, which was brought into sharp relief by a near-90 per cent surge in rice prices over 2024 levels. The government’s perceived mishandling of the issue became a proxy for its economic management and laid the groundwork for its crushing upper house defeat.
Japan is not in the throes of a “crisis of democracy”, says Kawashima Shin, a professor of international relations at the University of Tokyo, who adds that the country’s entrenched bureaucracy helps ensure stability through the rolling leadership changes.
But society-wide distrust in politics and especially in the LDP, which has struggled to recover from a slush fund scandal, will see the party limp along in minority government and with more leadership rotation likely, he says.
LDP veteran Sanae Takaichi, who lost to Ishiba during the last leadership race and is again a front runner, is renowned for her hawkish views on China.Credit: AP
Meanwhile, China has escalated its military activity around Japan’s territorial waters over the last year and the direction of its China policy will hinge on whether the LDP’s conservative flank wins back the leadership.
LDP veteran Sanae Takaichi, who lost to Ishiba during the last leadership race and is again a front runner, is renowned for her hawkish views on China.
After visiting Taiwan, which China claims as its territory, this year, she called for Japan, Australia, Europe and Taiwan to form a “quasi-security alliance” to protect each other’s interests. The idea will sink like lead in Canberra, which steps carefully around the Taiwan issue.
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Her main challenger is expected to be Shinjiro Koizumi, the 44-year-old scion of a former prime minister who has cultivated an image as a progressive reformer but lacks experience in foreign policy and is expected to stick with Japan’s current China policy settings.
For Chinese officials watching from Beijing, where party leadership is cast in generations, not months, the outcome of Japan’s “here today, gone tomorrow” politics probably counts more as intrigue than substance.
