Japan’s Prime Minister to Step Aside After Just a Year in Office

Yoshihide Suga’s abrupt decision came after he had spent days trying to salvage a historically unpopular administration.

TOKYO — Less than a year after becoming prime minister of Japan, Yoshihide Suga said on Friday that he would not seek re-election as chief of the governing party, paving the way for a new leader after his historically unpopular tenure. Mr. Suga, 72, assumed the prime ministership after Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, resigned last August because of ill health. Mr. Suga, the son of a strawberry farmer and a schoolteacher from the country’s rural north, had been a behind-the-scenes operator and often looked uncomfortable as a public-facing leader. His early departure threatens to return Japan, in the midst of its worst wave yet of the coronavirus, to the leadership instability that marked the period before Mr. Abe’s nearly eight consecutive years in power. During that time, the country churned through six prime ministers in six years, including Mr. Abe himself in an earlier stint.