Farewell, Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s unloved leader

Japanese prime minister Yoshihide Suga has fallen on his sword. Suga announced today that he will not be seeking reelection as leader of his party (the LDP), in effect resigning as prime minister in the process. The decision came without warning but wasn’t a huge surprise: Suga’s government is polling horribly at the moment and it was feared that the dour and unpopular leader would be a significant drag on his party’s prospects in the upcoming general election.

Suga’s farewell after just a year in the job makes it feel like the good old days again, when a revolving door at the prime ministerial residence in Nagatacho saw Japanese premieres enter and exit at a rate of about one a year. It was genuinely hard to keep up – as US secretary of state Madeleine Albright famously found when she asked her security advisor and top aides at a meeting to name the seven Japanese leaders from during the Clinton presidency.