Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced Friday that he would not seek reelection in the ruling party’s leadership race this month, amid plummeting approval ratings over his handling of the country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Suga’s announcement means he will step down just one year after he took office to fill the remainder of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s term. Abe resigned in 2020 because of ill health.
Suga, 72, announced his decision during a party meeting Friday, telling party leaders that he intends to focus on the country’s coronavirus crisis rather than recontesting the leadership.
In a brief statement on Friday afternoon, Suga said he made the decision after he weighed the toll of running a campaign while managing the country’s response to the pandemic.
“Both require a lot of energy … So I felt I should focus on measures to prevent the rapid spread of covid-19,” he said.
The party’s leadership accepted his announcement, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s secretary general Toshihiro Nikai said in a news conference Friday.
“To be honest I am surprised, but I think he made the decision after thorough consideration. We believe that it is not appropriate for us to question him about it,” Nikai said. “We will accept the leader’s decision.”
Suga’s term finishes at the end of September, and he had said previously that he would run for the party’s leadership election set for Sept. 29. He was set to face at least one challenger. Japan’s general election is scheduled for Oct. 17.
The prime minister had been facing intensifying criticism over his government’s handling of the coronavirus, which exposed Japan’s lack of pandemic preparedness. The country was slow to launch its vaccination program.
Tokyo and surrounding prefectures have been placed under a state of emergency for most of this year, but the measures are largely unenforced and have been falling on deaf ears among a pandemic-weary public.
Suga’s approval ratings tanked to below 30 percent in a national opinion poll conducted in late August by Japan’s Mainichi Shimbun newspaper.
Moreover, it became clear that Suga had lost the confidence of senior party figures, said Tobias Harris, senior fellow for Asia at the Washington-based Center for American Progress and a former Japanese legislative staffer.
“The problem really is that the party has decided there’s an election coming, he’s a liability, we know he’s a liability,” Harris said. “And they wanted a last shot at improving their chances of performing well in the [general] election — at least stop the bleeding and reverse the party’s course.”as government struggles to contain spread
