Koizumi Declares Candidacy for LDP Leadership Race

Tokyo, Sept. 20 (Jiji Press)–Agriculture minister Shinjiro Koizumi officially announced his decision Saturday to run in the Oct. 4 leadership election at Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party. “Recently, the LDP has been preoccupied with the issue of money and politics, and has been unable to face the worries of the public,” Koizumi, 44, said at a press conference in Tokyo, held to unveil his candidacy. “I’ll rebuild the LDP as a party that realizes the safety and security sought by the people, and I’ll take up the challenge with determination to lead this effort.” Koizumi said that if he becomes prime minister, he will “call on opposition parties to engage in policy talks in various fields and will seek agreements with them,” adding that he hopes to carefully assess whether the policies and principles of opposition parties match the LDP’s and deepen discussions on the framework of the government. The LDP and its coalition partner, Komeito, suffered major setbacks in last year’s election for the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the Diet, Japan’s parliament, and in the election for the House of Councillors, the upper chamber, in July this year. As a result, the ruling coalition is now short of a majority in both Diet chambers. The race to select a new LDP president to succeed Shigeru Ishiba, the country’s outgoing prime minister, is scheduled to kick off officially on Monday. Koizumi told the press conference that he will prioritize measures to tackle inflation, adding that he will swiftly consider drawing up economic measures and submit a draft supplementary state budget for fiscal 2025 to an extraordinary Diet session. Specifically, he pledged to scrap the provisional add-on gasoline tax rate at an early date. Koizumi also proposed the introduction of a system to review the minimum taxable income level based on rises in goods and services prices and wages, and set a target of increasing people’s average wages by 1 million yen by fiscal 2030. He sounded negative on giving 20,000-yen cash handouts per person to the public, which was one of the LDP’s policy pledges in the Upper House election. Koizumi said he is “in favor” of a proposal for Japan to introduce a selective dual surname system for married couples. But he did not include it in his policy pledges. He advocated for the system when he ran in last year’s LDP presidential election. He did not clarify whether he would continue visiting war-related Yasukuni Shrine, saying only, “I will make an appropriate decision as to what I should do if I become prime minister.” Koizumi maintains his practice of visiting the Shinto shrine in Tokyo since he was first elected to the Diet. Yasukuni Shrine is regarded as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism by other Asian nations such as China and South Korea because it enshrines Class-A World War II criminals along with the war dead. Koizumi, from the No. 11 constituency in Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo, has been elected to the Lower House six times. With his high name recognition and communication skills, Koizumi is expected to be a major candidate in the LDP race. In last year’s LDP presidential election, he finished third out of the nine candidates in the first vote and could not reach the runoff. The upcoming party election is expected to have five candidates, including Koizumi. The other four are Takayuki Kobayashi, 50, and Sanae Takaichi, 64, both former economic security ministers, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi, 64, and former LDP Secretary-General Toshimitsu Motegi, 69. On Saturday, Hayashi held a meeting in Tokyo with music industry people to discuss the current state of the content industry. Motegi visited the city of Kawaguchi in Saitama Prefecture, north of Tokyo, where disputes between locals and Kurdish residents have been reported. Kobayashi held a meeting in Tokyo with university students. In the capital, Takaichi met with young LDP members from the No. 2 constituency for the Lower House in Nara Prefecture, western Japan, from which she has been elected. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]