Further Falls for Kishida’s Support in June: Opinion Poll Update

Kishida Cabinet Plumbs New Lows

Nippon.com tracks eight media organizations’ opinion polls to gauge support for Japan’s administration, currently that of Prime Minister Kishida Fumio. In the polls for June 2024, seven of them saw support numbers fall for the Kishida government, with four—NHK, Jiji Press, Yomiuri Shimbun, and Nikkei—marking all-time lows for Kishida since he took office. Falls in the support rate were particularly apparent in four of them, with drops of 3 percentage points or more; Sankei Shimbun alone saw a rise in the support rate, with its first leap in eight months above the 30% line, to 31.2%.

Compared to the poll results for May 2024, which saw rises in the support rates in six out of eight polls, June once again produced a majority of downward turns for the administration.

Public Support for the Administration (June 2024)

Approval

Disapproval

Notes: Numbers in parentheses indicate point changes from the previous month’s results. Questions asked to respondents and methodologies differ for each organization; Jiji uses individual interviews, Mainichi uses texts sent to mobile phones and automated response queries sent to fixed phones, and the other companies use randomized calls to mobile and fixed phone numbers. NHK and Jiji Press carried out their surveys around June 7–10, Asahi and Sankei on June 15–16, Yomiuri, Kyōdō, and Mainichi around June 21–23, and Nikkei on June 28–30.

Little Change in an Election Season

A look at the Jiji survey, the one performed via interviews with individual respondents, shows 11 straight months since last August when the cabinet’s support rate has failed to climb north of the 30% line. During that time, it remained in even lower sub-20% territory for seven consecutive months. The disapproval rating, meanwhile, has been the majority view for eight months in a row.

During the ordinary session of the Diet that came to a close on June 23, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party worked with its junior coalition partner Kōmeitō, roping in additional support from Nippon Ishin no Kai (the Japan Innovation Party), to secure passage of revisions to the Political Funds Control Act. Core among these revisions were measures to strengthen punishments for misappropriations and misreporting of funds and to enhance transparency of political funding, but a number of items were mentioned in Diet proceedings as little more than “issues requiring further discussion.” As a result, the public take on this reform process, as evident in the opinion poll outcomes, was largely negative, casting doubt on official moves to clarify the ties between money and politics.

Within the ruling LDP, jockeying is intensifying ahead of the next party presidential election, scheduled to be held no later than September this year, as members decide whether to seek to replace Kishida, and if so, with whom. The results of the July 7 gubernatorial and metropolitan assembly by-elections in Tokyo are also likely to impact the national political course going forward.

(Originally published in Japanese on July 3, 2024. Banner photo: From left, LDP Secretary-General Motegi Toshimitsu, LDP President and Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, and LDP Vice-President Asō Tarō meet on June 21, 2024, at the National Diet. © Jiji.)