Japanese PM’S future likely to hinge on fate of 2020 Olympics
Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe might be the biggest loser if the Tokyo Olympics don’t go off as planned in just over four months.
Mr Abe has attached himself to the success of the Olympics since pushing hard for Tokyo’s selection at an International Olympic Committee (IOC) meeting in 2013 in Buenos
Aires, Argentina. Tokyo was picked over Istanbul by billing itself as a “safe pair of hands”.
It was also Mr Abe who charmed the closing ceremony of the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, parading before a 70,000 sell-out crowd as Nintendo game character Super Mario.
Mr Abe hopes to use the Tokyo Olympics as the capstone of his career as Japan’s longest-serving prime minister. But the games are in doubt, even though Japanese organisers and the IOC have repeatedly said they are going ahead on 24 July as planned.
The possibility of the first Olympic cancellation outside of wartime – or a postponement – is real in the face of the fast-spreading virus that the World Health Organisation has declared a pandemic.
David Leheny, a political scientist at Tokyo’s Waseda University,
said: “He [Abe] must certainly be worried that he might not be in charge if the Olympics were delayed for a year. He really has invested a lot in the idea of showing Japan to the world in the best possible light, and he’s extraordinarily reluctant to give that up.”
Mr Leheny speculated that Mr Abe’s tenure would be unlikely to survive a cancellation or postponement.