Mahiyaar Patel, Pune
Fumio Kishida became the first prime minister to face an ethics committee of the Japanese parliament. His popularity has eroded among the Japanese public. Parliament for the past several days has been rocked by controversial accusations that members of the ruling party; the Liberal Democratic Party, had failed to report hundreds of millions of yen given to the party for its upcoming national election campaign.
Though the Japanese prime minister himself has not been named in the scandal, he faces dipping approval ratings. His popularity is at an all-time low; his approval ratings as the premier are at 25%, the lowest it has ever been since he took office in 2021. The approval ratings for the liberal Democratic Party (LDP) are also at an all-time low of 30%.
“As the LDP leader, I apologize from my heart that this fundraising issue has raised suspicion and caused distrust in politics among the people,” Prime Minister Kishida said just before being questioned.
Members of the LDP have been insisting on a closed-door session for the proceedings of the committee and the opposition has been insisting on it being a public affair. The whole fiasco could end up delaying the passing of the national budget in the lower house of the Japanese parliament. Kishida wants to pass the budget in the lower house as time is running out for him. There is a rule in the Japanese constitution that lets the national budget automatically pass the upper house if it has stayed on the docket for at least 30 days and most importantly the financial year is about to end. So Kishida needs to pass his government’s budget by Easter day if Japan hopes to have a budget this year.
Kishida has repeatedly said that no matter what happens there cannot be a situation where no budget is passed. Critics of the opposition have said that the opposition’s demand to hold a defacto public trial of the prime minister is nothing more than a show and not a serious investigation.
The LDP has largely held continuous power since the Second World War, this is not the first time the LDP has been caught in a corruption scandal. It has faced many scandals over the many years and generations of leaders who have governed Japan, though this has been the most controversial in decades.