The creation of a government tells us much about the person who made it.
In the case of Fumio Kishida’s second Cabinet, announced earlier this week, we learned little new about the sitting prime minister. The new lineup is remarkably consistent with that of its predecessor, a government forged under the influence of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. It is a model of stability, continuity and balance. It is reassuring but it may not be enough.
Kishida was expected to shuffle his Cabinet in early September, but plummeting public approval ratings — double-digit falls — and mounting concern over politicians’ ties to the Unification Church along with rising tensions with China obliged him to move more quickly. As he explained earlier this week, “Our country is currently facing some of the greatest challenges of the postwar period, both domestically and internationally” and therefore “unity of government and within the ruling party is more important than ever if we are to overcome these difficulties.”