Japan PM Kishida Cabinet support rate at 17% even after ethics committee: poll

TOKYO — The support rate for Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s Cabinet remained low at 17% in the latest nationwide opinion poll conducted by the Mainichi Shimbun on March 16 and 17.

While the figure was up 3 percentage points from the 14% support rate in the previous survey carried out on Feb. 17 and 18, the Kishida Cabinet approval rating remained below 20% for two months in a row. Meanwhile, the disapproval rate dropped by 5 points to 77% in the recent questionnaire from 82% in the previous one.

The support rate for Kishida’s administration began to decline in June 2023 due to multiple problems surrounding the “My Number” national identification cards. Kishida took measures such as reshuffling his Cabinet in September, but it didn’t help buoy the administration. Since November, a slush fund scandal involving ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) factions has become more serious. Political ethics committee meetings were held in both houses of the Diet in which the party’s factional leaders and others made their defense, but there hasn’t been any progress made in clarifying the true nature of the problem.

The opinion poll was conducted using a combination of text messages via mobile phones and automated voice questionnaires on landlines. A total of 490 valid responses were received from cell phones and 507 from landlines. For landlines, some areas in Ishikawa Prefecture, which were severely damaged by the Jan. 1 Noto Peninsula earthquake, were excluded from the survey.

(Japanese original by Daisuke Nohara, Poll Office)