Photo/Illutration Prime Minister Fumio Kishida speaks to reporters on Dec. 18. (Takeshi Iwashita)

The approval rating of the Cabinet fell further to 23 percent, and nearly 60 percent of voters want Fumio Kishida to resign as prime minister, an Asahi Shimbun survey showed.

The approval rating is the lowest for any administration since the Liberal Democratic Party returned to power in December 2012. The disapproval rating rose to 66 percent, the highest since the LDP regained control of government, according to the nationwide telephone survey.

In the previous survey in November, the Kishida Cabinet’s approval rating was 25 percent, while the disapproval rating was 65 percent.

The latest survey was conducted on Dec. 16-17 after Kishida replaced four Cabinet ministers from the Abe faction in the LDP on Dec. 14.

The faction is suspected of distributing about 500 million yen ($3.5 million) in revenues from fund-raising parties to member lawmakers over the past five years without reporting the money in its political fund reports.

Seventy-four percent of respondents said they do not highly evaluate the way Kishida has handled the scandal, compared with 16 percent who said they do.

Kishida and other LDP leaders on Dec. 6 agreed that intraparty factions will refrain from holding fund-raising parties for the time being.

Kishida on Dec. 7 also resigned as chief of the LDP faction that he had led since 2012.

Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they want Kishida to go further and step down as prime minister at an early date, more than twice the ratio of 28 percent who said they want him to remain in the post.

Despite all the problems facing the government and the ruling LDP, a large majority of voters do not see the opposition parties as an answer to the political turmoil.

Seventy-eight percent of respondents said they cannot expect the opposition to be a “counterbalancing force to the LDP,” compared with 15 percent who said they can.

When the same question was asked in October 2022 on the one-year anniversary of the Kishida administration, 81 percent of survey respondents replied in the negative and 15 percent in the affirmative.

The LDP has previously been rocked by huge money-in-politics scandals, such as the Lockheed payoff scandal in the 1970s and the Recruit shares-for-favors scandal in the 1980s.

Seventy-eight percent of survey respondents said the LDP cannot change the way it works when it comes to money in politics, compared with 17 percent who said the party can reform itself.

Even among LDP supporters, 59 percent replied in the negative.

The support rating for the LDP dropped to 23 percent, the lowest since December 2012, after hovering in the upper 20s for five months through November.

The previous low for the LDP since December 2012 was 26 percent, recorded in October this year and in late May of 2020.

The support ratings for opposition parties were all in the single digits.

The Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan garnered 5 percent of support, while Nippon Ishin (Japan Innovation Party) received 4 percent.

The survey was conducted through calls to randomly generated telephone numbers. There were 472 valid responses from voters contacted by fixed telephones, or 48 percent of the total, and 664 responses from those contacted by cellphones, or 39 percent.

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