On August 14 of this year, Prime Minister of Japan Fumio Kishida announced that he will not run for head of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party at the end of the three-year term provided for in the party’s charter. This is a remarkable event in the current life of the country.

Our recent forecast regarding the inevitability of F. Kishida’s early resignation as president of the ruling LDP in Japan and, consequently, resignation from the post of prime minister of the country turned out to be true. September will see both of these events unfold when the LDP’s calendar congress will be held, during which a new party president will be elected for the next three years.

He will also become the new prime minister of the country, who will almost certainly alter the Cabinet of Ministers in some way or another. As F. Kishida himself did three years ago, when he found himself at the head of both the LDS and the government. After that, he repeatedly changed the composition of the Cabinet of Ministers, demonstrating to the population that he is working to solve various bothersome problems. However, this had almost no effect on the generally well-established negative attitude towards the government of F. Kishida, whose rating is stable at 20%.

Immediately following F. Kishida’s statement on stepping down, leading Japanese publications analysed the entire three-year period of his premiership, noting his successes and failures. The former are mainly associated with foreign policy, the latter with domestic policy.

The general opinion boils down to the fact that a sharp aggravation of the international situation could not but negatively affect one of the main participants (Japan) in the current stage of the «Great Global Game», which was marked at the by the (very strange and iconic) «Skripal case» end of the last decade.

The leadership of the party and government of Japan face the age-old question:

What to do?

Considering the very fundamental nature of both this issue and related state problems, it seems that the ‘case’ will be limited........

© New Eastern Outlook