page_title: Tarō Asō
section_title: Prime Minister of Japan
hierarchical_section_title: Tarō Asō / Political career / Prime Minister of Japan
caption_attribution_description: President Barack Obama meeting with Prime Minister Taro Aso of Japan in Oval Office.
context_page_description: Tarō Asō is a Japanese politician who has been Deputy Prime Minister of Japan and Minister of Finance since December 2012. Asō previously served as Prime Minister of Japan from September 2008 to September 2009.
  Asō was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1979. He served in numerous roles, including as Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2005 to 2007, and became Secretary-General of the Liberal Democratic Party in 2008, having also held that role temporarily in 2007. He was later elected LDP President in September 2008, becoming Prime Minister the same month. He led the LDP to its worst election result in its history a year later, marking only the second time in post-war Japan that a governing party had lost re-election. The LDP returned to government following the 2012 election under Shinzo Abe, and Asō was appointed to the Cabinet as Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister.
context_section_description: Unexpectedly on 1 September 2008, Fukuda announced his resignation as Prime Minister. Five LDP members including Asō ran for new party President to succeed Fukuda. On 21 September, one day before votes of Diet party members, Asō reportedly told a crowd of supporters outside Tokyo: "The greatest concern right now is the economy." "America is facing a financial crisis ... we must not allow that to bring us down as well." Finally on 22 September, Asō did win. He was elected as President of LDP with 351 of 525 votes (217 from 384 Diet party members, 134 from 47 prefecture branches); Kaoru Yosano, Yuriko Koike, Nobuteru Ishihara, Shigeru Ishiba got 66, 46, 37, 25 votes respectively.
  Two days later on 24 September, Asō was designated by the Diet as Prime Minister, and was formally appointed to the office by the Emperor on that night. In the House of Representatives (lower house), he garnered 337 out of 478 votes cast; in the House of Councillors (upper house), Ichirō Ozawa, President of the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan, was named through two times of ballots. Because no agreement was reached at a joint committee of both Houses, the resolution of the House of Representatives became the resolution of the Diet, as is stipulated in the Constitution. Asō reportedly said, "If you look at the current period, it's not a stable one." and "These are turbulent times with the financial situation and everything else."
  Later on the same day as his election as Prime Minister, Asō personally announced his new Cabinet (this is normally done by the Chief Cabinet Secretary). His Cabinet was markedly different from the preceding Cabinet under Fukuda. Five of its members had never previously served in the Cabinet, and one of them, 34-year-old Yūko Obuchi, was the youngest member of the Cabinet in the post-war era.
  Prime Minister Asō flew to Washington to meet with United States President Barack Obama in February 2009. He was the first foreign leader to visit the Obama White House; however, reports suggested that the new administration was interested less in giving Asō a political boost than in sending a message that Japan continues to be an important ally and partner – a low-risk, high-payoff gesture for both Asō and Obama.
  After his election as prime minister Asō was expected to dissolve the lower house to clear the way for a general election. But he repeatedly stressed the need for a functioning government to face the economic crisis and ruled out an early election. Only after passage of the extra budget for fiscal 2009 in May and facing internal pressure from the LDP after a series of defeats in regional elections – most notably the Tokyo prefectural election on 12 July – he decided to announce a general election for 30 August 2009. He dissolved the House of Representatives on 21 July 2009. The LDP lost by a landslide to the Democratic Party of Japan, in the face of record levels of post-war unemployment. Accepting responsibility for the worst (and second-only) defeat of a sitting government in modern Japanese history, Asō immediately resigned as LDP president.
caption: Tarō Asō meeting President Barack Obama in the White House.
exif: {}