(Bloomberg) -- Japan’s ruling party leadership race kicked off Thursday with the weakened grip of party elders enabling a record number of candidates to...
-- Japan ’s ruling party leadership race kicked off Thursday with the weakened grip of party elders enabling a record number of candidates to enter a wide-open contest to steer the nation through a critical period of transition.Nine leadership hopefuls gave opening remarks at Liberal Democratic Party headquarters in Tokyo to begin the campaign for the Sept. 27 LDP presidential election , including two candidates under the age of 50 and two women.
All of the candidates are pledging to defeat deflation and raise incomes as they seek to boost consumption and reinvigorate economic growth, but they differ on the degree of spending and structural reform needed to achieve these goals. The election is set to be the most open vote in decades due to the demise of influential groups within the party known as factions.The LDP election is the first since a slush fund scandal that began last year rocked the party.
“Up until now, if a young and inexperienced person wanted to stand, the faction would hold that person back,” said Mieko Nakabayashi, a professor at Waseda University in Tokyo. The decline of factional power may give the winner of the election a freer hand to decide cabinet positions. That could put better-suited people in positions, leading to better policy execution, some political analysts say.
Even without the formal existence of factions, candidates will likely still be calling on former faction allies for support and potentially looking to do deals to shore up votes, said Kristi Govella, an associate professor of Japanese politics at Oxford University in the UK. Junichi Kanda, who served as a parliamentary secretary for finance in the Kishida administration, said he was concerned that the decline of factions meant the LDP election was taking on the appearance of popularity contest. He said it would be risky to pursue only a sense of renewal and change while the Japanese economy faces difficulties and steady navigation is required in the fields of diplomacy and security.
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