The Liberal Democratic Party elected Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga as its president on Monday.
Suga will be named the prime minister at an extraordinary Diet session to be convened on Sept. 16.
The party election, scheduled after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced his resignation, was held during a joint plenary meeting of LDP members from both houses of the Diet at a hotel in Tokyo.
Suga, 71, scored a resounding victory with 377 votes in the first round of voting. LDP Policy Research Council Chairman Fumio Kishida, 63, received 89 votes and former LDP Secretary General Shigeru Ishiba, 63, gained 68 votes.
A total of 534 votes were cast by the 393 LDP Diet members -- 282 from the House of Representatives and 111 from the House of Councillors -- and 47 prefectural LDP chapters. Each chapter had three votes for a total of 141.
Suga was supported by five of the seven LDP factions, specifically the Hosoda, Aso, Takeshita, Nikai and Ishihara factions. This led him to a clear victory over Kishida and Ishiba, who were backed by their own factions.
Suga has been serving as chief cabinet secretary since the inauguration of the second Abe Cabinet in December 2012, and has been the backbone of the administration. During the election campaign, Suga called for continuity with the Abe administration and advocated striking a balance between containing the novel coronavirus and social and economic activities.
Suga does not belong to a faction, effectively making him the first party president without any affiliation.
He is also the first party president since Toshiki Kaifu, who served as prime minister from 1989 to 1991, whose father was not a Diet member nor the head of a local government.
Suga's term as party president runs until the end of September 2021, seeing out the remainder of Abe's term.
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