ƒ’ƒǡ ™‘”Ž†
he resigned due to ulcerative colitis following his party’s poor performance in the 2007 Upper House elections.
He made a remarkable political comeback in 2012, reclaiming the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party and winning the general election that December. Abe won national elections in 2014 and 2017, entrenching his power over the weak and divided opposition parties.
Introduced
He introduced his signature economic policy, ‘Abenomics’, based on massive deficit spending, quantitative easing and attempts at structural reform. However, twice raising the consumption tax undermined these attempts to lift the Japanese economy out of its decades-long stagnation.
A member of the ultranationalist lobby group Nippon Kaigi, Abe carried out a far-reaching transformation of Japanese foreign and defence policy, reinterpreting the pacifist Article 9 of the Constitution, to allow greater overseas deployment of the Self-Defense Forces.
His government increased defence spending annually, and in 2015 the Diet (the Japanese Parliament) passed controversial security Bills that allowed the Self-Defense Forces to participate in collective defence operations with allied countries, particularly the United States but potentially also Australia, India and the United Kingdom.
Abe originally raised the concept of the Quad security partnership between Japan, the US, Australia and India, and in 2016 formalised the phrase ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ as Japan’s main foreign policy goal to preserve the US-led rules-based liberal order in international relations.
His longevity in office saw him become one of the most experienced world leaders, and he used his foreign policy experience to steadily manage the US alliance, handling the erratic President Donald Trump through ‘golf diplomacy’.
Abe was able to maintain fairly stable relations