Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi appointed Shinzo Abe as Japan's top government spokesman in a cabinet reshuffle on Monday, strengthening the popular Abe's position as a candidate to succeed the prime minister next year.
Koizumi, who led his Liberal Democratic Party to a landslide win in a general election last month, has said he will step down when his term as party head ends next September and that he would appoint potential successors to key posts in the reshuffle.
In a surprise, he excluded Yasuo Fukuda, seen as one of Abe's strongest rivals, from the cabinet and key party posts.
"This experience will be a huge asset for him whatever the position he assumes as a politician in the future," Koizumi said of Abe's appointment as the chief cabinet secretary.
The 51-year-old Abe, a hawk on security issues and an outspoken critic of China, is a soft-spoken political blueblood who consistently tops media polls of voters' preferences for who should succeed Koizumi, in office since April 2001.
Abe brushed off the succession issue at a separate news conference where he announced Koizumi's new cabinet. "I have never thought of myself as a Koizumi successor," he said.
In a newspaper poll in early October, 55 percent of voters said they supported Abe, the grandson of a former prime minister and son of a former foreign minister, as the next prime minister.
Fukuda, 69, himself a former top government spokesman and the son of Koizumi's political mentor, former Prime Minister Takeo Fukuda, came a distant second at 9 percent.
On his decision to exclude Fukuda, Koizumi told a news conference: "I think Fukuda is a strong candidate (as a future prime minister). I don't think that people who joined the cabinet or became party executives are the only candidates."
Sadakazu Tanigaki and Taro Aso, who round out the media's "top four" list of candidates to take over from Koizumi, stayed in the cabinet - Tanigaki remaining finance minister and Aso, who was in charge of internal affairs, becoming foreign minister.
Robert Feldman, chief economist for Japan at US investment bank Morgan Stanley, wrote in a report on Monday: "Infighting over the succession to PM Koizumi could paralyse policy, if Abe falters as cabinet secretary."
Abe has gained political capital through his support for the families of Japanese abducted by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, and his frequent calls for sanctions against Pyongyang.
Heizo Takenaka, who as economics minister was Koizumi's right-hand man on economic issues and who played a pivotal role in drafting the postal privatisation plan, was named internal affairs minister with a brief to streamline the government.
Koizumi has cast cutting government spending, including personnel costs, as a policy priority following the enactment of postal privatisation bills earlier this month.
For the defence minister's post, Koizumi chose Fukushiro Nukaga, a 61-year-old expert on security issues who played a key role in wrapping up a recent agreement with the United States over the relocation of a US military base in Japan.