Suga Calls Time on a Truly Miserable Year Running Japan
Covid is collecting political scalps across the region. Japan’s leader was just the next in line.
Suga said he couldn’t simultaneously campaign and combat Covid.
Photographer: Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP/Getty Images
Who wants to be a national leader in the pandemic era? Yoshihide Suga declared he was done after a year and relinquished leadership of Japan, which is wrestling with an inconsistent economic recovery and soaring infections. Governing in the Covid years is especially fraught for premiers that lack a popular mandate; it’s hard enough for those who actually won elections.
Suga may go down in history as the guy who had the misfortune to rise from the Liberal Democratic Party backroom, only to get lumbered with an Olympic Games that Japanese were deeply ambivalent about and the delta variant. His brief administration was an asterisk to the eight years of Shinzo Abe, who was Japan’s longest serving prime minister and Suga’s mentor.