Kishida elected Japan PM, set to call Oct. 31 general election

TOKYO, Oct. 4 Kyodo - Fumio Kishida was elected as Japan's new prime minister by parliament on Monday, forming a Cabinet that will seek to keep COVID-19 under control while reviving a battered economy as he looks to appeal to voters heading into an upcoming general election. The election for the House of Representatives, the more powerful lower chamber of parliament, is slated to take place Oct. 31, according to people familiar with Kishida's thinking, earlier than the first half of November, which had been expected. Kishida replaces Yoshihide Suga, who resigned after just over a year in office amid criticism of his pandemic response. The Diet convened an extraordinary session in the afternoon to choose the new prime minister. However, the vote was little more than a formality as the ruling coalition led by the Liberal Democratic Party, which chose Kishida as its new leader last week, has a majority in both chambers. The 64-year-old received 311 of 458 votes in the lower house and 141 of 241 votes in the House of Councillors. "This is the real starting point. I will go forth with a strong sense of determination, with a strong resolution," Kishida told reporters at the LDP's Tokyo headquarters in the morning ahead of the vote. In his Cabinet, Kishida retained Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi and Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi while tapping former Olympics minister Shunichi Suzuki as finance minister and Hirokazu Matsuno, a former education minister, as chief Cabinet secretary. The new prime minister will be formally inaugurated in a ceremony at the Imperial Palace and hold a press conference in the evening. According to senior LDP figures, Kishida plans to dissolve the lower house on Oct. 14 and begin the campaigning period for the general election on Oct. 19. It will be his first major test in office, in which he will need to defy his image as a low-key consensus builder who struggles to excite voters. With around 60 percent of Japan's population fully vaccinated and COVID-19 cases in decline, Kishida's immediate task will be preventing another surge in infections while gradually lifting restrictions on social and business activities and reopening the border to foreign travelers. Kishida has vowed to boost middle-class incomes and break from the "neoliberal policies" of the last two decades, which he said, "created a division between the haves and the have-nots." This suggests a course correction from the "Abenomics" policy mix pursued by Suga and his predecessor Shinzo Abe, which helped lift corporate earnings and stock prices but did little to spark wage growth. Kishida has also vowed to draw up an economic package worth "tens of trillions of yen" within the year to deal with the pandemic, to be included in the state budget for fiscal 2022. Unlike Suga, who retained many of Abe's Cabinet picks, Kishida's appointees include 13 ministerial first-timers, including economic and fiscal policy minister Daishiro Yamagiwa and Takayuki Kobayashi, who will take a new post focusing on economic security. There are three women in the new Cabinet -- vaccination minister Noriko Horiuchi, administrative reform minister Karen Makishima, and Seiko Noda, the minister in charge of gender equality and establishing a new agency for children's policy. Having served as foreign minister from 2012 to 2017, Kishida has underscored the importance of realizing a free and open Indo-Pacific and is expected to continue cooperation with the United States to address China's growing assertiveness as well as the recent resumption of missile tests by North Korea. Hailing from a political family in Hiroshima, he has promised to push forward efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons while arguing that Japan should consider giving the Self-Defense Forces the capability to conduct missile strikes on hostile enemy bases. It is unclear how much social change there will be under Kishida, a moderate who has called for further debate on whether to allow married couples to take separate surnames and who is "undecided" on whether same-sex marriage should be legalized. Suga's Cabinet resigned en masse Monday morning, 384 days after its formation, making him the 12th shortest-serving prime minister in the postwar era. Repeated COVID-19 states of emergency and poor policy communication sent the Cabinet's approval ratings plummeting, with the Tokyo Olympics doing little to buoy sentiment. The general election will be key for Kishida to avoid a similar fate. While the LDP and its junior coalition partner Komeito are unlikely to lose their majority in the lower house, opposition forces, including the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, may snatch away some seats by consolidating candidates, political analysts say. The timing of the vote means Kishida will skip a Group of 20 summit to be held in Rome at the end of the month, according to people familiar with the matter. He plans to attend a U.N. conference on climate change scheduled to take place from Oct. 31 to Nov. 12 in Glasgow, they said. ==Kyodo