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Japan‘s parliament on Monday narrowly voted for Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba to stay on as leader, after his coalition lost its parliamentary majority in a lower house election last month.
Ishiba had called the snap poll immediately after taking office on October 1, following the resignation of his predecessor Fumio Kishida in a party financing scandal.
Runoff vote decisive, putting Ishiba atop a minority government
The ruling coalition led by Ishiba’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) — the dominant force in Japanese politics for almost all of the last 70 years — lost its parliamentary majority in the vote, but the LDP and its Komeito ally combined still won the largest bloc of seats.
This was reflected in Monday’s parliamentary vote requiring a second round runoff for the first time in 30 years, with no outright majority for any prime ministerial candidate in the first round of voting.
Ishiba ultimately claimed 221 votes second time around, in a 465-seat chamber, when merely winning more votes than his rival was sufficient to proceed.
Former Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, who leads the largest opposition faction, the Constitutional Democratic Party, finished a fairly distant second with 160 votes.
Ishiba reappointed most of his core Cabinet members, including Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya, Defense Minister Gen Nakatani and Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi, but had to replace three who lost seats or were affected by the election results.
Seeking new allies, or opposition support for legislation
Ishiba had refused to step down and said he would instead seek additional coalition partners to try to re-establish a majority government.
He had made overtures to a smaller, up-and-coming conservative opposition party, the Democratic Party for the People, which now holds 28 seats in the lower house. But so far, that party has indicated it is not willing to join a formal coalition, but intimated that it might be prepared to support some proposals from the minority government from opposition.
That party’s leader, Yuichiro Tamaki, had been trying to build on the momentum already established, but he faced unrelated pressure on Monday as he admitted that a magazine article exposing an extramarital affair was accurate.
Prime Minister Ishiba’s immediate domestic challenge is compiling a supplementary budget for the fiscal year through March, and getting it through parliament. There are also elections to Japan’s less influential upper house, the House of Councillors, scheduled next year.
The prime minister has a busy schedule of foreign travel, with a trip to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Peru likely this week, and then the G20 summit in Brazil on November 18 and 19.
Ishiba has said he is also hoping to arrange a stopover in the US around the time of the G20 summit, for talks with returning US President-elect Donald Trump after his election win.
msh/rmt (AP, Reuters)