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Taro Aso is favourite to take over as prime minister in Japan

Is Taro Aso the man to rescue Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and cure the country's political drift, following prime minister Yasuo Fukuda's resignation? With Mr Aso's emergence as the front-runner to become the next LDP leader, and thus prime minister, this question has dominated the political pages since Mr Fukuda's surprise announcement on September 1st. The Economist Intelligence Unit believes that the answer is ultimately "no", although Mr Aso does offer the party its best chance of improving its desperate standing before the next general election. Nonetheless, there is a high risk that, if elected as LDP president on September 22nd, he will fare little better than his predecessor.

Mr Aso's hopes rest on his potential to emulate Junichiro Koizumi, a prime minister who oversaw the LDP's thumping lower-house election win in 2005 before retiring the following year and watching the party stumble from one crisis to the next, as a political maverick. With a rasping voice, a well-known love of manga comics and a notorious tendency to outspokenness, Mr Aso is popular with voters, including the young. He is not, strictly speaking, very much like Mr Koizumi at all, representing a conservative wing of the party and lacking a similar vision of policy reform. In fact he is a blue-blooded member of the LDP establishment, but his appeal lies in the perception that he is at the same time an outsider. At any rate, he is currently the only LDP figure with anything like the national standing required to lead the party into the next lower-house election, which must be held by September next year but which is looking increasingly likely to be called before the end of 2008. ...