Suga secures 70% of Diet members’ votes in LDP leader race
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga has a wide lead before the ruling Liberal Democratic Party presidential election. According to a Yomiuri Shimbun survey of 394 LDP lawmakers, Suga has secured about 70% of Diet members’ votes, placing him ahead of LDP Policy Research Council Chairman Fumio Kishida and former LDP Secretary General Shigeru Ishiba.
The lawmakers’ anticipated votes for Suga exceed a majority of the total votes to be cast, including those from LDP prefectural chapters, showing a strengthened trend toward Suga being elected as the new party leader.
With the campaign officially starting on Tuesday and the voting and ballot counting on Sept. 14, the election will be contested with a total of 535 votes at stake — those of 394 LDP Diet members plus three representatives from each of the 47 prefectural chapters. The candidate who gets the majority of votes — at least 268 — will be elected as the new party president.
Among 394 LDP lawmakers from both chambers of the Diet, excluding the speaker of the House of Representatives and the president of the House of Councillors, 378, or 96% of them, replied to the survey through interviews and other means to confirm their intention for the election.
As of Friday night, the number of LDP lawmakers who clearly expressed their intention to support Suga was 271, or 69% of the 394 LDP Diet members, the survey showed.
In the survey, Suga secured votes from Diet members belonging to five factions that have expressed their support for him: the Hosoda faction (the largest, at 98 lawmakers), the Aso faction (54), the Takeshita faction (54), the Nikai faction (47) and the Ishihara faction (11). In addition, 41 out of 64 lawmakers who do not belong to any faction replied that they would support Suga.
As the reasons for supporting Suga, there were many who answered that Suga “has a leadership” or that they “have a high opinion of his policies.”
A middle-ranking LDP lawmaker said, “In order to seamlessly implement measures against the novel coronavirus, it is natural that Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga, the right-hand man for Prime Minister [Shinzo] Abe, will continue them in the post of prime minister.”
Those who supported Kishida numbered 46, while those for Ishiba numbered 23, indicating that neither could get support beyond their own factions, whose respective memberships are 47 and 19.
Thirty-eight lawmakers said that they have yet to decide for whom they will vote, or that they would not answer.
On the other hand, as to local votes that were allocated to the prefectural chapters, 46 chapters are likely to hold a primary vote by rank-and-file LDP party members and others, including a questionnaire survey.
The Akita prefectural chapter had initially planned a primary vote by its party members, but decided at an executive members’ meeting on Friday to cast all three votes for Suga, who is from the prefecture, without holding a primary vote.
According to the survey, as of Friday, 32 prefectural chapters intend to adopt the D’Hondt method, under which ballots are allocated according to the percentage of votes each candidate obtains. Six chapters are considering adopting a winner-takes-all system, under which the candidate who wins the most votes would receive all three ballots.