Abe suffers huge election blow
A CHASTENED Japanese Prime Minister vowed yesterday to win back public support after his party suffered a historic drubbing in local elections that media chalked up to growing arrogance and analysts said threatened his continued hold on power.
The Sunday polls, in which Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lost more than half its seats in the Tokyo metropolitan assembly, were seen as a bellwether for national political sentiment and came as Abe is buffeted by a series of setbacks and scandals that have driven down his popularity.
A new political party set up by former TV anchorwoman Yuriko Koike, elected Tokyo governor in a landslide vote last year, was able to capitalise on this to seize 49 seats out of 127, becoming the leading group in the capital’s assembly in election.
“We have to take [the result] seriously as a severe criticism against our party the LDP,” a humbled Abe told reporters yesterday morning, after its seat count shrunk from 57 to just 23, a record low.
Abe was elected prime minister in late 2012.
But the 62-year-old is under fire over claims he showed favouritism to a friend in a business deal, which the prime minister has denied.
Those came a few months after he was forced to deny connections to the controversial director of a school that had purchased government land at a huge discount – and counted Abe’s wife as its honorary principal. — AFP Sunday’s