Ishiba cabinet support rate up to 40% despite minority govt status

The approval rating for the cabinet of Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba rose 7.9 percentage points to 40.0 percent, a Kyodo News survey showed Sunday, with a majority of respondents supporting the ruling coalition's minority government seeking policy deals with smaller parties.

The telephone poll, conducted over two days from Saturday, showed the cabinet's disapproval rating at 38.8 percent, down from 52.2 percent in the previous survey in late October.

Some 67.9 percent said they approved of the ruling coalition's plans to work with smaller parties to pass bills smoothly, while 26.4 percent said the ruling bloc should allow opposition parties to join the coalition to form a majority.

As a minority government, Ishiba's ruling Liberal Democratic Party plans to cooperate on a policy-by-policy basis with opposition parties.

The latest survey comes after Ishiba was reelected as prime minister in a special parliament session Monday last week, even though the LDP and its junior coalition partner the Komeito party lost majority control of the House of Representatives in the Oct 27 general election.

The approval rate was a slight recovery toward the 50.7 percent support rate Ishiba received a day after he became prime minister on Oct 1.

A major focus of political negotiations is the Democratic Party for the People's campaign pledge to increase household incomes by raising the income tax threshold from 1.03 million yen to 1.78 million yen. Of those polled, 69.9 percent expressed support for the policy.

In discussions with the LDP and Komeito, the DPP calls on the ruling coalition to include the higher income threshold in the economic stimulus that the Ishiba government aims to draw up by the end of this month.

On the victory of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election, 32.4 percent said his return to the White House will be a negative for Japan-U.S. relations, while about 56.1 percent said ties will remain unchanged and 8.1 percent said they will improve.

Trump is expected to pursue protectionist policies and his proposed tariffs could affect Japanese exporters' trade with the world's largest economy.

Among political parties, 30.5 percent support the LDP, down 1.3 points, and support for the main opposition party, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, fell 5.2 points to 15.1 percent.

The DPP was down 0.8 point at 9.0 percent, while Komeito gained 0.5 point to 3.9 percent.

The nationwide survey saw 480 randomly selected households with eligible voters contacted and 3,119 mobile phone numbers, yielding 414 and 607 responses, respectively.