A Cabinet is said to have entered "dangerous waters" if its public approval rating sinks below 30 percent. Only 2 1/2 months after Mr. Taro Aso came into power, the approval rating for his Cabinet has fallen to 25.5 percent, a drop of 15.4 percentage points from November, according to a Kyodo News poll. Other polls by three major newspapers put the rate at 21 percent or 22 percent.
The disapproval rating in the Kyodo poll rose to 61.3 percent, up 19.1 percentage points. This is an ominous figure, indicating that about two-thirds of the public do not trust Mr. Aso as the nation's leader at a time when a global financial crisis is battering Japan.
The fall in the approval rating is rapid when compared with those for the administrations of Prime Ministers Shinzo Abe and Yasuo Fukuda. About three months after the inauguration of the Abe Cabinet, it enjoyed an approval rating of 48.6 percent. For the Fukuda Cabinet, the corresponding figure was 35.3 percent. The approval rating for the Abe Cabinet went down to 29 percent when the Liberal Democratic Party suffered a big loss in the July 2007 Upper House election.