Abe to push revision of Japan’s pacifist constitution

TOKYO: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, buoyed by a huge election win for lawmakers who favour revising Japan’s post-war, pacifist constitution, is likely to push towards his long-held goal but will need to convince a divided public to succeed.

Parties in favour of amending the US-drafted charter won nearly 80% of the seats in Sunday’s lower house election, media counts showed.

That left the small, new Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDPJ) as the biggest group opposed to Abe’s proposed changes.

Formed by liberal members of the Democratic Party, which no longer exists in the lower house, it won 54 seats, a fraction of the ruling bloc’s two-thirds majority in the 465-member chamber.

Abe said he wanted to get other parties, including Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike’s new conservative Party of Hope, on board and was not insisting on a target of changing the constitution by 2020 that he floated earlier this year.

“First, I want to deepen debate and have as many people as possible agree,” he said on Sunday. “We should put priority on that.”

Amending the charter’s pacifist Article 9 would be hugely symbolic for Japan. Supporters see it as the foundation of post-war democracy but many conservatives view it as a humiliating imposition after Japan’s defeat in 1945.

It would also be a victory for Abe, whose conservative agenda of restoring traditional values, stressing obligations to the state over individual rights and loosening constraints on the military, centres on revising the constitution.

“Mr Abe is trying to create a legacy. His first legacy project was to get the economy out of deflation,” said Jesper Koll, head of equities fund WisdomTree Japan.

“The second legacy is to change the constitution. You can debate whether he has a mandate but what will make or break him ... is the constitutional issue.”

Any revision of the constitution requires support from two-thirds of the members of each chamber of parliament and a majority in a public referendum, with no minimum quorum.

Abe proposed last May adding a clause to Article 9 to legitimise Japan’s Self-Defence Force. Read literally, Article 9 bans a standing military but has been interpreted to allow armed forces exclusively for self-defence. — Reuters