Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga sought balance among the supporters who nominated him to run for president of the Liberal Democratic Party by including lawmakers who were not affiliated with a faction.
In contrast, his two rivals were nominated mainly by lawmakers from their own factions.
The race for the presidency was officially announced Tuesday, pitting Suga against Fumio Kishida, chairman of the LDP Policy Research Council, and Shigeru Ishiba, a former LDP secretary general. Suga is backed by five out of the party's seven factions.
Among the names of 20 supporters submitted by each candidate, Suga's list included 16 members from the Hosoda, Aso, Takeshita, Nikai, and Ishihara factions, as well as four non-factional lawmakers. Former Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada, like Suga an LDP member who does not belong to a faction, was appointed as the representative of Suga's endorsers.
The number of supporters from each faction ranged from one to five, depending on the size of the faction.
There was also balance between the generations, with Suga's list including veterans who have served as ministers and younger mid-level officials who have been elected four times or less.
Defense Minister Taro Kono, a member of the Aso faction who had expressed his desire to run for LDP president, was also among Suga's endorsers. Kono is popular not only among his own faction members, but among some mid-ranking and younger lawmakers as well.
Kono is believed to have been listed because Suga has expressed high regard for him. Kono represents a constituency in Kanagawa Prefecture, the same prefecture where Suga's is located.
In addition to lawmakers from his own faction, Kishida also received the endorsement of four non-partisan lawmakers who belong to the Yurin-kai, a group led by former LDP President Sadakazu Tanigaki. Among them were Toshiaki Endo, a former minister for the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games who serves as the Yurin-kai's representative, and House of Representatives member Yasuhiro Ozato, both of whom once belonged to the Koga faction, a predecessor of the Kishida faction.
Endo told those around him that he wanted to support Kishida because they "were once in the same faction." He became the head of the Kishida's campaign headquarters.
However, the Kishida camp's goal of receiving an endorsement from a member of another faction did not materialize. They asked two members of the Takeshita faction who were elected in Hiroshima Prefecture, which is Kishida's home prefecture, to serve as his endorsers, but they did not agree.
The Ishiba faction has only 18 lawmakers, not including Ishiba, and so cannot assemble the 20 members necessary to file for his candidacy on its own. This time around, four non-factional members -- former minister for administrative reform Seiichiro Murakami, former education minister Kisaburo Tokai, former Defense Minister Gen Nakatani, and lower house member Keiichiro Tachibana -- were included among the 20 supporters
Also listed was Asahiko Mihara, a member of the Takeshita faction.
Tokai said the reason for his endorsement was that he and Ishiba "shared a common political view."
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