The lower house of Japan's Diet (parliament) today re-elected Shigeru Ishiba as prime minister, by a simple majority of the ruling coalition and after he lost his absolute majority in the last elections.
Ishiba won 221 votes out of 465 in the lower house in the second round of voting, defeating Yoshihiko Noda, the main opposition leader, who won 160 votes.
The current Japanese leader will head a government in a much weaker position than it was in before the last election, when Ishiba's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Buddhist Komeito party held an absolute majority.
Ishiba will lead Japan's first minority government in nearly three decades and, for the first time in 30 years, it took two rounds of voting in the lower house to elect a prime minister.
This is an unusual and uncertain political phase that Japan is entering after the LDP, which has governed virtually without interruption since 1955, suffered an electoral shock in the snap election on the 27th, called by Ishiba after winning the party primaries.
The 67-year-old politician took over the reins of a LDP that has been mired in a deep leadership crisis since the departure of the historic Shinzo Abe in 2020 and successive scandals, the latest of which was corruption, one of the reasons voters were punished.
The promises of reformism and honesty, and the government team he surrounded himself with at the beginning of October - full of veteran figures and continuity - were not enough to regain voters' trust, and the LDP obtained its worst result in the last elections since the last time it lost power, in 2009.
The coalition led by Ishiba will now have to count on other parties to approve fundamental legislative initiatives, having already begun negotiations to that end with other conservative or center-right parties.
However, the gains in representation achieved by parties such as the Popular Democratic Party (PPD, in opposition) put these movements in a stronger position to attack the government or demand that it incorporate proposals, which will condition the legislature of the new executive.
