Japan might make history on Saturday with its next prime minister choice.
A party leadership election is set to take place on Saturday, October 4, after Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba announced last month that he was stepping down.
The governing Liberal Democratic Party's (LDP) election winner will most likely become the new prime minister of Japan when parliament votes in mid-October.
As per the result, a key US ally and the world's fourth-largest economy could end up with its first female prime minister or its youngest leader in more than a century.
Conservative nationalist Sanae Takaichi, 64, and the more moderate Shinjiro Koizumi, 44, are the frontrunners among the five candidates.
Yoshimasa Hayashi, 64, who is currently the Japanese government's top spokesperson, has also surged in public opinion polls and could end up on top.
The new LDP leader will be selected by 295 lawmakers and almost 1 million rank-and-file party members, who will be represented by another 295 votes. The top two candidates are likely to then enter a runoff.
"There's a lot of uncertainty, but right now, polls suggest that Koizumi is in the pole position," said Jeff Kingston, a professor of Asian studies and history at Temple University’s Japan campus.
The LDP, which has governed Japan almost uninterrupted since the end of World War II, is doing some "soul-searching," Kingston said, after they faced pubic scrutiny due to party corruption scandal as well as public dissatisfaction with the rising cost of living.
Determined to change its image and bring forward a "fresh face", the party needs to "hand the baton to a younger, more charismatic leader," Kingston noted.
Koizumi, the son of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, is a former environment minister but gained more prominence recently as agriculture minister when he was able to rein in runaway prices of rice, a staple Japanese food.
He would be Japan's youngest leader since Hirobumi Ito, who was just a few months younger than Koizumi when he became the country's first prime minister in 1885.
On the other end of the rope is Takaichi, a close ally of assassinated former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan's longest-serving leader, whose wing of the LDP has been tarnished by corruption scandals.
"Their [those who back Takaichi] view is that the LDP has to return to its DNA to be the right-wing conservative party, and that Takaichi is the one best positioned to sort of return to the glory of Abe," Kingston said.
Takaichi, who has a passionate hard-line conservative base among rank-and-file party members, says one of her role models is former British leader Margaret Thatcher.
But some LDP lawmakers consider Takaichi too far right, expressing concern that her nationalistic historical views could undermine relations with China, Japan's biggest trading partner.
Moderate forces could unite behind another candidate to block Takaichi from winning, much as they did in last year's leadership race when she lost to Ishiba.
