Shifting to Collective Leadership

The political colleagues of late former prime minister Shinzo Abe still cannot choose his successor. Seiwa Policy Study Group, the largest faction in Liberal Democratic Party, decided to establish the Regular Board Council with fifteen members of lawmakers chaired by Ryu Shionoya. However, as Shionoya reiterated that it was not the time for that, the group failed to raise the new head replacing Abe. The chair of the council is not fully recognized as the head of Seiwa group. The group continues embracing a possibility of division in the future. 

Shionoya, 73, is a senior member of the House of representatives, working for ten terms beginning 1990. After Abe died, he and another senior lawmaker, Hakubun Shimomura, led the group as deputy heads of Seiwa group. Under the influence of former prime minister Yoshiro Mori, a very old retired politician of Seiwa group, the group chose the structure of collective leadership without any eminent single leadership. Shimomura, who insisted in electing a head person, was excluded from the members of the Regular Board Council.

 

Fifteen members of the Regular Board Council include the five young leaders in the group: Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno, Chairman of LDP Diet Affairs Committee Tsuyoshi Takagi, Minister of Economy, Industry and Trade Yasutoshi Nishimura, Chairman of LDP Policy Research Council Koichi Hagiuda and Secretary General of General Assembly for LDP Lawmakers in House of Councillors Hiroshige Seko. Other nine board members are selected from current or former Ministers and LDP board members.

 

Shionoya admitted that he would be a kind of interim leader for the group. “Regretfully, there is no person suitable for the head of the group,” he told to the reporters. But without any strong leadership, it is not easy to maintain the group as big as about one hundred members. Although some of the top fifteen members are ambitious enough to be the prime minister, no one of them have enough supporters for it. To be a prime minister, it is necessary for a candidate to have inarguable endorsement from the home group.

 

It is obvious that the board members are too many for a group having about one hundred members, the fact which meant that there was no prominent leader in the group to manage party politics. For the lawmakers with LDP, the role of a faction is defined as obtaining ministerial posts by negotiating with prime minister, or achieving support from the party for each candidate in next election. While Abe exercised political power for the group members, none of the new leaders have enough power to draw decisions preferable for the group. The situation that the merit to join the group is declining shows difficult standpoint of the Seiwa group.

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