Election risk pays off for Japan’s leader as his party heads to impressive victory
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 that 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 Monday 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 two-thirds 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 that 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 that 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. Polls have shown that voters are split on whether they would approve such a measure.
“I think you’ll see the conversation revolve all around what is doable,” said Sheila A. Smith, a Japan expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. “The bargaining is what is interesting.”
Sunday’s parliamentary victory could also embolden Abe to run next year for a third term as leader of the Liberal Democrats. If he won, he would be Japan’s longest-serving prime minister.