©Reuters. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida attends a bilateral meeting with Kenyan President William Ruto at the Prime Minister’s Office in Tokyo, Japan, Thursday, February 8, 2024. Shuji Kajiyama/Pool via REUTERS
By Sakura Murakami
TOKYO (Reuters) – Fumio Kishida will become the first sitting Japanese prime minister to appear before a parliamentary ethics commission on Thursday, in a bid to draw a line under a funding scandal that has damaged his popularity and could delay next year’s budget.
Kishida’s presence follows weeks of wrangling between the opposition and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) over the technicalities of how to hold the hearings, which will examine how some LDP factions failed to bring back tens of millions of yen from fundraising parties.
The opposition had called for a full public hearing including five key members of the largest faction involved in the scandal. The LDP had argued for a closed-door session.
Kishida is not directly implicated in the scandal, but told reporters Wednesday that he planned to attend the media presence because he feels “a strong sense of urgency that people’s distrust in politics will deepen further if this situation continues.” Japanese broadcaster NHK reported that the committee would question him.
“I hope that legislators… fulfill their responsibility to explain their actions on various platforms, including this ethics committee, to allow us to revive trust in politics,” Kishida said.
Support for Kishida and his LDP government has fallen to its lowest point since Kishida took the top job in 2021, with approval for the premier at 25% and support for the LDP at around 30%, according to a poll by NHK in early February. .
The hearing negotiations also threatened to delay the fiscal 2024 budget, which Kishida hopes to pass in the Lower House by March 2 to ensure the 30 days needed for a budget to be automatically adopted before the start of the fiscal year in April.
A failure to deliver the budget smoothly would deal another blow to Kishida as he tries to drum up support ahead of an LDP leadership contest in September, Tobias Harris, an expert on Japan politics at the Marshall Fund, said in a statement German.
“If Kishida wants to survive and fight for another term in September, he must show convincing cleanliness, put an end to the scandal and hope for good economic news and some diplomatic results: a state visit to Washington in April, for example, allow him to defend his leadership again,” he said.