Japanese Prime Minister Ishiba promises to stay in office despite the electoral debacle | Elections news

Shigeru Ishiba says he wants to make sure that the new tariff agreement agreed with the United States is properly implemented.

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba denied information according to which he planned to resign for a historic defeat that his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) suffered in an election of a weekend, saying that he wanted to ensure that the price The United States is implemented appropriately.

The Japanese newspaper The Yomiuri Shimbun, in an additional edition on Wednesday, said that Ishiba had decided to announce his resignation by the end of July after receiving a detailed report from its commercial negotiator, Ryosei Akazawa, paving the way for a party leadership vote to choose his successor.

Asked about media reports that he had expressed his intention to resign this month, the 68-year-old chief told journalists at the party’s headquarters on Wednesday: “I never made such a statement … The facts reported in the media are completely unfounded.”

The reports surfaced after Ishiba and American president Donald Trump unveiled on Tuesday a trade agreement which reduces prices on imports of Japanese cars and Tokyo spare parts to punish new samples from other goods.

Ishiba previously announced on Monday her intention to remain to meet urgent challenges, including pricing talks with the United States, without creating a political vacuum, leading to calls for the interior and outside of her party for a quick resignation to respond to the results of the elections.

Ishiba has undergone increasing pressure to resign as a center-right LDP and its junior coalition partner, Komeito, lost their majority Sunday, the 248 -members’s upper room, the smallest and least powerful of the two -room parliament, shaking power and political stability in Japan.

The LDP has governed almost continuous since 1955, three years after the end of the country’s American occupation following the Second World War.

The murderous loss means that the ruling coalition, which also lost a majority in the most powerful lower chamber in October, is now lacking in the majority in the two chambers of Parliament, which makes it even more difficult for its government to achieve political objectives and to worsen Japan’s political instability.

Ishiba welcomed the trade agreement on Wednesday, which places a 15% tax on Japanese cars and other goods imported into the United States from Japan, from the 25% initial before the deadline of August 1, claiming that it was a product of difficult negotiations to protect the national interest and that this would contribute to both parties because they work together to create more jobs and investment.

Some analysts, however, smashed it as “not at all”. Seijiro Takeshita, Dean at the Graduate School of Management, Informatics and Innovation from the University of Shizuoka, people told Al Jazeera that people should look beyond the figures in the assessment if the trade agreement was good for Japan.

During the election of the election of Sunday, voters frustrated by price increases exceeding the pace of wage increases, in particular the youngest who have long ignored the concentration of the government on senior voters, quickly turned to the preservative and emerging populist parties, such as the Democratic group for the people and the “first Japanese” Sanseito, who arose in Sunday’s vote.

The potential departure of Ishiba less than a year after the adoption of his functions would trigger a battle of succession within the LDP in power, because he supports these challenges of new political parties, in particular on the right, which escape his support.

Resentment has also persisted on an LDP funding scandal.

“I really hope things will be better in Japan, but the population is down, and I think that living in Japan will become harder and harder,” Naomi Omura, an 80 -year -old man from Hiroshima, to the AFP news agency.

“It is disappointing that Japan cannot act more strongly” towards the United States, but “I think it was good that they agreed from a lower price,” she said.

None of the opposition parties expressed its interest in forming a full -fledged alliance with the governing coalition, but they said they were ready to cooperate on politics.