Ailing, Abe steps down, Yoshihide Suga enters as new Japan PM

Former chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga became Japan’s new prime minister on Wednesday, and is expected to closely champion Shinzo Abe’s policies during his record-breaking tenure.

Suga, 71, won an easy victory in a parliamentary vote, where his ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) held a commanding majority.

His new cabinet was announced shortly after the vote, with several ministers keeping their jobs, including Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi and Finance Minister Taro Aso.

Abe formally resigned earlier Wednesday along with his cabinet, ending his record run in office with a year left in his mandate.

He was forced out by a recurrence of ulcerative colitis, a bowel disease that has long plagued him.

In a comment, Suga stated his run was inspired by a desire to pursue Abe’s policies, although analysts warned of challenges ahead.

The newly elected Suga, has spent decades in politics, and has a reputation for pushing government policies through a sometimes intractable bureaucracy.

He doggedly defended the government as its chief spokesman, even including certain testy exchanges with journalists.

His upbringing, as the son of a strawberry-farmer father and schoolteacher mother, sets him apart from Japan’s many blue-blood political elites.

But while he has championed some measures intended to help rural areas like his hometown in northern Japan’s Akita, his political views remain something of a mystery.

Suga has said kickstarting the economy, which was already in recession before the pandemic, will be a top priority, along with containing the virus — essential if the postponed Tokyo 2020 Olympics are to open as planned in July 2021.

And on the foreign policy front, where Suga is a relative novice, he is also likely to tread the path charted by Abe, prioritising the key relationship with the United States, regardless of who is president after November’s election.

Relations with China may prove trickier with a global hardening of opinion against Beijing after the coronavirus and unrest in Hong Kong.

Abe, who served as prime minister for a total of eight years, will stay on as a lawmaker, with some mooting the possibility he could undertake diplomatic missions.

On Wednesday morning as he prepared to resign, Abe said he had given “all his strength” and was ending his tenure “with a sense of pride”.

“I owe everything to the Japanese people.”

[Sourced from AFP]