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| Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe |
By Peter Harris
With Shinzo Abe returned to power, is Japan back to an era of foreign policy stability?
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe managed to increase his electoral majority in Japan’s lower house in elections held earlier this month. Although historically low turnout diminished the potency of Abe’s “mandate” from the people, the LDP politician can be forgiven for using his fresh – indeed, crushing – electoral victory as justification to press ahead with some controversial policies in the immediate- term. Yet Abe’s convincing showing at the polls also portends some important implications for long-term Japanese politics, particularly with respect to Japan’s role in the world.
Abe called snap elections amid criticism of his divisive economic reforms, dubbed Abenomics. Aided by the largely lackluster showing of the opposition parties, the prime minister was able to win the day in conclusive fashion: his right-of-center Liberal Democratic Party won 291 seats in the House of Representatives, well over the 238 needed for a parliamentary majority. Combined with the seats taken by coalition partners Komeito, this haul gives Abe’s government a commanding 326 seats (over 68 percent of the total) in the new-look lower house. The LDP-Komeito coalition already wields a solid majority in the House of Councilors, Japan’s upper house, which is elected separately.
Nearly half of eligible voters declined to vote in the recent elections, which for some onlookers points to a worrying trend of disengagement and disillusionment among the Japanese electorate. But by far the most significant trend in historical terms is the fact that the LDP has seemingly managed to weather what once looked like a formidable challenge to its hegemony in Japanese politics. Barring a brief spell of fragile coalition governments during the early- to mid-1990s, the LDP governed Japan continuously between 1955 and 2009, exerting a steady and predictable influence over the direction of East Asia’s largest economy. In recent years, however, an insurgent force in Japanese politics – the Democratic Party of Japan – had threatened to break the LDP’s dominant party status, wresting the premiership from the LDP’s grip between September 2009 and December 2012.
Read the full story at The Diplomat