Tokyo, Sept. 16 (Jiji Press)–Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, also president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, launched a reshuffled leadership team of the party on Wednesday. She kept key officials, including LDP Vice President Taro Aso, 85, and Secretary-General Shunichi Suzuki, 73, in their posts with an aim to further stabilize her administration. By retaining Aso, who is a main backer of Takaichi and heads the party’s only remaining faction, and Suzuki, a member of the Aso faction, the prime minister is apparently trying to pave the way for her re-election as LDP president in the party’s leadership poll in autumn next year. Policy Research Council Chairman Takayuki Kobayashi, 51, who ran unsuccessfully against Takaichi in last year’s LDP presidential election, was allowed to stay on, as were Election Strategy Committee Chairman Yasutoshi Nishimura, 63, and Executive Acting Secretary-General Koichi Hagiuda, 63, both former members of a now-defunct intraparty faction once led by the late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Former Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Hideki Murai, 46, was appointed parliamentary affairs chief, succeeding Hiroshi Kajiyama, 70, who became head of the party’s decision-making General Council. “We will try to carve out a future with our policies until people feel affluent and secure with economic growth,” Takaichi told reporters at the prime minister’s office. In line with the leadership team revamp, Kazuhiko Aoki, 65, head of the steering committee of the Senate, was named to replace Junichi Ishii, 68, as LDP secretary-general in the upper chamber of the Diet, or parliament, under the authority of Masaji Matsuyama, chairman for the party’s lawmakers in the chamber, formerly called the House of Councillors. On Thursday, Takaichi is set to revamp her cabinet, likely appointing a member of the Japan Innovation Party, the LDP’s coalition partner, to a ministerial post for the first time since the two parties formed the partnership last October. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]
