Election risk pays off for Abe as his party appears to win big
TOKYO — Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan won a commanding majority for his party in parliamentary elections Sunday, NHK, the public broadcaster said, fueling his hopes of revising the nation’s pacifist constitution.
NHK said Abe’s governing Liberal Democratic Party and its allies had overcome challenges from upstart rivals to capture two-thirds of the seats in the lower house of parliament. Final results will be delayed until later today because a typhoon that battered Japan on Sunday prevented votes from being counted in 12 precincts. But with the majority of votes counted, the Liberal Democrats and their coalition partner had won enough seats to reach the twothirds mark.
Pre-election opinion polls had shown lukewarm support for the prime minister’s policies and competition from a party founded by Tokyo’s popular governor, Yuriko Koike, as well as another new center-left party.
For Abe, the results were a vindication of his strategy to call a snap election a year earlier than expected, and they raised the possibility he would move swiftly to try to change the constitution to make explicit the legality of the Self-Defense Forces, as Japan’s military is known.
The constitution, in place since 1947, calls for the renunciation of war, and Abe said in May that it should be amended to remove any doubt about the military’s legitimacy, a view he reiterated Sunday evening.
Amending the constitution requires the support of two-thirds of both houses of parliament. Abe’s party and its allies had those numbers before Sunday’s elections, but the prime minister’s political woes earlier this year, along with the public’s doubts about a constitutional change, created the possibility he would lose the supermajority in the lower house.
Even with the votes he needs in parliament, Abe now must persuade the public, as any constitutional change needs to be approved by a majority of voters.
Sunday’s parliamentary victory could also embolden Abe to run next year for a third term as leader of the Liberal Democrats.
But the results were a setback for Koike, who started her new party, Kibou no To, or Party of Hope, with great fanfare just hours before Abe called the early election last month. After she decided not to run for office, voters lost interest.