Only about a third of Japanese support Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda's government, reflecting growing discontent over its handling of a public pensions crisis and a defence procurement scandal, a poll showed on Sunday.
The approval rating for the cabinet slid 11.7 percentage points from early last month to 35.3 percent, according to the weekend opinion poll conducted by Kyodo news agency over telephone.
Fukuda, who succeeded Shinzo Abe in September, started out with a support rate of 60 percent. The drop in the approval rate follows an admission by the government this week that it might never be able to sort out some of the 50 million public pension accounts found earlier to have been mishandled by officials, Kyodo said.
It said the survey showed 57.6 percent of respondents called the government's stance on the pension issue a "breach of a pledge."
Outrage over the bungled pensions records was a big factor in the ruling camp's huge loss in a July upper house election.
Opposition parties are also pushing for deeper probes into whether ruling party politicians were involved in a defence procurement scandal. Japanese prosecutors last month arrested a former top defence official over suspicions he took bribes from a former defence contractor.
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