Pyeongtaek, South Korea ¨C Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Wednesday made a surprise announcement that he would not be seeking reelection in next month¡¯s Liberal Democratic Party presidential election. As a result, the ruling party will select a new leader and the country will have a new prime minister.
Considering there is another full year left before the current term of the Lower House expires, Kishida¡¯s announcement has many wondering why. To make sense of the situation, here are five points that may help.
The first is that although Kishida¡¯s sudden announcement may have been a surprise, the fact that he would be replaced this September is not. The average tenure for an LDP prime minister is only about 2 1/2 years ¡ª a mark that Kishida surpassed earlier this year. Save for a few outliers like Eisaku Sato, Junichiro Koizumi, and, most recently, Shinzo Abe, the party has tended to cull its own leadership to manage domestic support and internal party politics.
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