TOKYO - Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's government faces the first major scandal since taking office after appointing Kazuo Yana, who had been disciplined over the Liberal Democratic Party's factional slush-fund scandal, as agriculture minister, a misstep that could mark a turning point for her administration after a year of high honeymoon approval ratings.
In other words, she may no longer be able to contain scandals and blunders with strong public support. Questions will arise as to whether vetting failed to uncover Yana's problems or whether she knew them when she appointed him.
The episode shows that blunders can occur when the prime minister takes the initiative herself, exposing limits to her leadership.
The case was triggered by weekly magazine reports, but parliamentary scrutiny of Yana's remarks and qualifications revealed him to be a politician extremely careless about his conduct. In that sense, the Diet played an important role.
Takaichi tends to make political decisions alone and has few advisers within the party. Yana was one of them and Takaichi's one-woman show, reliant on politicians like him, is increasingly reaching its limits.
A nationwide emergency telephone poll conducted by Kyodo News in September put Cabinet support at 53.4 percent. I do not think that figure will fall easily, as she has a solid core base of support and is unlikely to drop below 30 percent for the time being.
Within the party, many believe it is best to wait and see as long as her approval ratings remain higher than those of former prime ministers Shigeru Ishiba and Fumio Kishida. It may be fair to say Takaichi's political shelf life is nearing its end.
The Takaichi Cabinet's failure to build a cohesive team undermines its capacity to sustain a long tenure in office. Its weaknesses have not become apparent because it has not undertaken any truly important policies so far.
The government is likely focused only on drafting next fiscal year's budget to cut the consumption tax on food and beverages, but there are other tasks to address. Its diplomacy is also inadequate, as shown by its absence from a video conference of Group of Seven leaders.
Party members are watching closely to see where the next failure will possibly emerge. The administration could enter a negative spiral in which weekly magazines uncover scandal after scandal.
Had the Yana issue not emerged, the Takaichi administration was expected to seek passage of various bills by overriding defeats in the Senate, where the ruling bloc is in the minority, through reapproval by a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives. This blunder, however, has raised the hurdle for such overrides.
Opposition parties had struggled to attack the Takaichi administration, fearing a backlash from criticizing a government with high approval ratings. They had been restrained in parliamentary deliberations.
This time, however, they succeeded in showing the prime minister shielding Yanagi. The administration has survived on Takaichi's performance skills and public expectations of her, but those expectations may gradually fade.
Rather than simply driving the administration from office, opposition parties should form a broad bloc and demonstrate that they could govern better than the Takaichi Cabinet if they took power.
(Izuru Makihara, born in 1967, is a professor at the University of Tokyo. As a graduate of its Faculty of Law, he holds a doctorate in academic studies and specializes in public administration and Japanese political history.)
