The Liberal Democratic Party's headquarters told the Fukuoka prefectural federation on the 28th that it cannot issue endorsement certificates for the next unified local elections as things stand. The words were delivered by a prime ministerial aide who sits in the Fukuoka federation himself, and both outlets we hold report — separately, each from its own reporting — that they came from the prime minister, Sanae Takaichi.
西日本新聞 has what she is said to have added. She told the aide beforehand to convey her thinking properly, and to warn him that he too would be asked about it. A person close to her describes her fury in a sentence: she would never again let anyone run an election using the name of the party president, meaning her own.
The affair underneath is money and the speakership. Allegations of payments around the posts of speaker and deputy speaker of the Fukuoka prefectural assembly ended in the resignation of the former speaker, Isao Kurauchi, long one of the most powerful figures in the prefecture's politics. The assembly member who blew the whistle has testified that the federation's own chairman was among those who received money — his testimony, not an established fact.
The chairman and the federation's secretary-general were called to party headquarters in Tokyo just after ten on the morning of the 28th, and questioned for about 45 minutes. The party's secretary-general, Shunichi Suzuki, who had been standing back until then, changed on the same day: as recently as the 25th he had been saying the prefectural federations have wide autonomy, and now he went as far as endorsement, saying he expected the party to clean itself up.
Why headquarters is watching Fukuoka is in the recent record. The slush-fund scandal cost the party the 2024 lower-house election and the 2025 upper-house election in succession and left it governing as a minority, before the prime minister led a landslide in February this year. Her stated goal now is re-election as party president next autumn, and a bad unified local election would disturb that.
One person said nothing at all. On the 25th, the day Kurauchi took off his badge, the party's vice-president Taro Aso — himself a heavyweight of Fukuoka politics — sat across from the prime minister at lunch and did not raise the subject. Aides of his are heard saying that dangling endorsement is going too far.
TNC found the effect further down. A first-term prefectural assembly member asked whether they would really not be endorsed: the posters were already made, and without it they cannot be put up.
Why it is on the board
Sixth on the Japanese reading list when we collected, carried by 西日本新聞, with the television station TNC on the same list at twenty-sixth.
Both accounts we hold are from Fukuoka. This is a prefectural story that reached the national reading list through the local paper and the local broadcaster, not through Tokyo — and the two of them are the ones who established, independently, that the instruction came from the prime minister.
확인: 西日本新聞 · TNCテレビ西日本