There are world leaders who have better press outside their homes than inside them. Leaders with a high international profile, who move well on the global geopolitical board, but whose internal popularity is at rock bottom. We are not talking about Pedro Sánchez. The protagonist of these lines is a Japanese who has managed to relaunch his country as an influential world power, but who is cornered by corruption, economic mismanagement and political instability.
Banker Fumio Kishida (66 years old) has already gone down in history in his country for approving a historic rearmament that broke with Japan’s traditional pacifist policy inherited from the postwar period. He has strengthened ties with liberal democracies in the West, joined sanctions against Russia, made peace with neighboring South Korea and stood up to China’s growing assertiveness. Even a few months ago, during an electoral event, was the victim of a failed attack attempt with a homemade bomb that had nuts stuck inside like shrapnel.
For all this, adding the photo of the symbolic summit of G-7 leaders held in Hiroshima with Kishida as host, the Japanese earned a lot of sympathy while weathering the internal turbulence with some solvency. But the rampant inflation ended up tearing many pockets and the explosion of a public funds scandal within the ruling party is pushing the prime minister towards the abyss.
The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), satiated with power after ruling almost always in Japan since the end of the Second World War – with the exception of a period of three years and 10 months in two electoral cycles -, collapses due to greed and the divisions between the factions that control a political formation that functions internally as a coalition of opposing parties within the same acronym.
Kishida, who comes from one of Japan’s many political dynasties (son of a high official and grandson of a parliamentary millionaire), came to power a couple of years ago thanks to the support of the party’s most powerful faction, the one that traditionally was led by the late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. It was within this group that a plot of irregular political financing of more than 500 million yen (around three million euros) emerged from which several PLD bigwigs would have benefited.