August Opinion Polls Find Low Popularity for Kishida As He Ends His Term

Short of 30% Support Across the Board

In the monthly public opinion polls carried out by Japan’s major media organizations in August 2024, little change was seen in support for the administration of Prime Minister Kishida Fumio. His support rates registered a low of 19.4% in the Jiji Press poll and a high of only 28% in the Nikkei survey. Jiji’s poll, carried out through direct interviews with respondents, has placed Kishida below the 30% support level for 13 straight months now, beginning in August 2023.

Despite his August 14 announcement that he would not seek reelection as president of the Liberal Democratic Party, effectively his resignation as prime minister, the needle moved little, and while touching on his party’s political fundraising scandal, he acknowledged: “To show the people that the LDP is changing, the clearest first step to take is for me to step down.”

Despite a brief uptick in Kishida’s approval rating in the first half of 2023, it has generally trended lower from mid-2022 to the present day. The October 2021 general election, held soon after he first took office, saw his LDP win a comfortable majority of 261 seats in the House of Representatives. He enjoyed relatively strong popularity through the early months of the following year, with his approval rating hitting a high of 52.6% in April 2022, and in the July House of Councillors election that year, the LDP also gained a majority in the Diet’s upper house.

An Assassination and a Change of Fortunes

During the campaigning for that upper house election, former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō was felled by an assassin in Nara Prefecture—a pivotal moment for the Kishida government. Kishida made the divisive decision to hold an official state funeral for the former leader, and soon saw his party mired in the messy untangling of its ties with the Unification Church, which had inspired the killer to carry out his deed. Support rates for his administration would plummet rapidly, hitting a low around the beginning of 2023.

This rate showed more dramatic swings during 2023, rising as Kishida approached his hosting of the G7 summit in his hometown of Hiroshima in May (and triggering talk that he might dissolve the lower house and call a snap election). In the second half of the year, though, it was falling again, as his administration was dogged by issues including trouble with the “My Number” personal identification system. A September reshuffling of his cabinet and an October announcement of tax cuts could not staunch the bleeding, and when the news broke toward the end of the year of the LDP’s slush fund scandal, the support rate plunged deeper into the cellar. There it would remain for the rest of his term in office, as more and more of the media organizations’ polls gauged his support to be well below the 30% mark.

Indeed, one of his only popular decisions in recent months was his announcement that he would step down from party leadership and the premiership. Questions in the August surveys by Nikkei, Sankei Shimbun, Yomiuri Shimbun, Mainichi Shimbun, and Kyōdō News found far more respondents who felt his decision had been appropriate than who thought it was uncalled for.

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 August 2–5, Kyōdō News on August 17–19, and the remaining organizations around August 21–25.

Kishida’s remaining time in office will continue to be tumultuous. The official campaign period for the contest to determine the LDP’s new president kicks off on September 12, with voting to take place on September 27. The Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, the main opposition party, chooses its new leader in an election period running from September 7 through voting on September 23.

(Originally published in Japanese on August 29, 2024. Banner photo: Prime Minister Kishida Fumio ends the press conference at which he announced he would not seek reelection as LDP president in Tokyo on August 14. Pool photo; © Jiji Press.)