Abe sweeps in but fails to excite voters
JAPAN: Shinzo Abe won a decisive victory in a snap election yesterday, easily fending off two new opposition parties and putting him on course to be Japan’s longestserving prime minister.
However, low voter turnout suggested a lack of popular enthusiasm for his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and a continuing sense of apathy about politics across the nation.
Those who did turn out gave Abe a more decisive victory than he might have expected when he called the election a month ago.
Early results and exit polls published by the state broadcaster NHK suggested that the LDP would return between 255 and 300 MPs; a safe majority of the 465 seats in the lower house of parliament, the Diet.
Together with dozens of seats won by its coalition partner, the Buddhist party Komeito, this could give the ruling coalition the two-thirds ‘‘super-majority’’ needed to call a referendum on changes to the country’s pacifist constitution: the passionate wish of the prime minister and many of his conservative supporters.
Abe fought the election on a promise to protect Japan from the threat of North Korea, after two ballistic missiles were fired over the country. His support ratings had been in decline because of a corruption scandal.
‘‘As I promised in the election my imminent task is to deal firmly with North Korea,’’ Abe said as the scale of his victory became clear. ‘‘For that, strong diplomacy is required.’’
Analysts said, however, that the turnout of barely 54 per cent confirmed a broad unease with Abe’s nationalist agenda. Once again he appears to owe as much to weakness and division in the opposition as to the mixed results of nearly five years in power. He had been under no obligation to go to the polls until the end of next year.
His decision to dissolve parliament early appeared at first to have been a miscalculation, after a dramatic shift in the political landscape. It was set in motion by Yuriko Koike, a popular former LDP cabinet minister and now the governor of Tokyo. As Abe was preparing to dissolve parliament she announced the formation of her own national conservative party, the Party of Hope. Seiji Maehara, leader of the opposition, effectively disbanded his Democratic Party and urged his MPs to run under her leadership.
Koike then rejected defecting MPs whom she said did not share her conservative views, emphasising her ideological affinities with Abe – and alienating liberal and centrist voters. She also decided to stay on as governor of Tokyo and not to run as an MP, thus depriving her party of its only credible candidate for prime minister and the source of its political appeal. Koike was not even in Japan for election day, having travelled to Paris for a conference on climate change.
Separately, the Left wing of the defunct opposition had successfully relaunched itself as the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP), competing against Koike’s followers and dividing the opposition vote.
The CDP did a little better than expected, with a projected 44 to 61 MPs, but the Party of Hope made a disappointing showing and was expected to win 38 to 55 seats. Speaking from Paris, its absent leader was contrite. ‘‘This is a tough result, and we need to analyse the reasons for it,’’ Koike said. ‘‘Things I’ve done may have caused concern and displeasure, and I apologise for that.’’
The results confirm a paradox about Abe, who continues to win handsome election victories despite his personal unpopularity and a dislike of his policies. If he serves two years of his new fouryear term he will become Japan’s longest-serving prime minister.
Yet a poll four days before the election by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper found that 51 per cent of respondents did not want Abe to continue as prime minister and only 34 per cent did. – He calls it his ‘‘long-cherished dream’’, and for many of his conservative nationalist supporters it is the holy grail of political reform, the righting of a historic misstep after seven decades.
So with another election landslide to his credit, will Shinzo Abe press on with his goal of changing Japan’s pacifist constitution?
Early results suggested that his coalition was close to the two-thirds ‘‘super-majority’’ that would enable him to call a referendum on constitutional amendments. If he does not, one of the biggest opposition parties, the Party of Hope, also supports such a change. But even with the parliamentary numbers on his side, constitutional reform is almost certainly beyond Abe’s reach, for the simple reason that most Japanese do not want it.
Drawn up by General Douglas MacArthur’s occupying US forces in 1947, Japan’s constitution has never been amended. It replaced the constitution enacted in the name of the nation’s first modern emperor, Meiji, under which Japan developed into a repressive military state that launched disastrous wars, first on the Asian mainland and then against the United States.
The postwar constitution established a democratic political system based on a parliamentary model, with the emperor reduced to a politically powerless ‘‘symbol of the state and of the unity of the people’’. The constitution’s most famous sentence, article 9, states that ‘‘Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the
The chance for constitutional reform may come only once in a generation.
nation’’ and promises that ‘‘land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained’’.
The coming of the Cold War made a defenceless Japan inconvenient to the US, and the term ‘‘Self-Defence Forces’’ (SDF) was devised to sustain the fiction that the country was adhering to article 9 while building up one of the largest and richest armed forces in the world.
Mr Abe has scaled back his ambitions from cutting article 9 altogether to altering it to make the SDF legitimate - but referendums are dangerous undertakings, as David Cameron learnt over Brexit. Even tabling modest amendments would plunge Japan into a bitterly divisive debate that could easily backfire on the government.
It would risk rousing and uniting Japan’s somnolent and divided left wing and provoking the kind of largescale demonstrations that have not been seen since the 1970s. Opinion polls suggest that victory would be highly uncertain.
The chance for constitutional reform may come only once in a generation. Mr Abe’s nationalist supporters will want to make the push only when victory is certain.
- The Times