Tokyo – Japan’s troubled ruling party on Sunday chose as its leader an admittedly uncharismatic party elder known for his dovish foreign policy and quiet political know-how.
Yasuo Fukuda, 71, a longtime salary man in the oil industry before serving as Cabinet chief under two prime ministers, will formally become prime minister Tuesday.
He will take over from Shinzo Abe, the relatively youthful (at 53) but corrosively unpopular prime minister who left his party in perhaps its worst political mess since World War II, when he abruptly announced his desire to quit 11 days ago and checked into a hospital for stress-related stomach trouble.
The Liberal Democratic Party, which has monopolized post-war political power in Japan, badly lost its way during Abe’s one year in power, as financial scandal and failure to address a pension fiasco involving 50 million misfiled pension records led to a crushing defeat in a midsummer election in the upper house of parliament. The LDP still controls the lower house, which selects the prime minister.
“It has become clear that we have not won the trust of the Japanese people,” Fukuda said Sunday evening after his selection as party leader. “In order to win back trust, one can only build one block at a time.”
To that end, Fukuda is promising to tone down the nationalist rhetoric of his two most recent predecessors, strengthen ties with China, negotiate with North Korea and carefully cultivate Japan’s strong relationship with the United States.
He has promised not to visit the Yasukuni war shrine in Tokyo, where a handful of Japanese war criminals are honored among the country’s 2 million war dead.
