COMMENTARY Shinzo Abe's host of challenges By Richard Halloran |
A politically astute Japanese sought to make sense out of the disarray in his homeland before the vote for the upper house of the Diet, or parliament, next Sunday. "In a word," he said, "Prime Minister Abe will lose. The only question is how much."
"If the LDP," he said, referring to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party, "loses only a few seats, Abe-San will survive even though his opponents may start maneuvering against him. If the LDP loses a lot of seats, Abe-San's enemies will try to force him to resign."
Prime Minister Abe himself is not standing for re-election and, indeed, the upper House of Councilors must defer to the lower House of Representatives in picking a prime minister. Even so, the election is widely seen as a referendum on Abe's tenure since he succeeded Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi last September. About half of the 240 upper house seats are being contested.
The new prime minister started off well, saying he envisioned "a beautiful Japan that is full of vitality, opportunities, and compassion; that values the spirit of self-reliance; and that opens itself to the world, which inspires admiration and respect from the people of the world, so that our children's generation can be confident and proud."
He made shrewd visits to China and South Korea to mend fences with neighbors angry about issues left from World War II. His initial meeting with President Bush, in Hanoi during an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, seemed to go well as did a visit to Washington in April. He got the Diet to adopt several critical pieces of legislation, including one that calls for teaching values in school.
Then things unraveled. Three cabinet ministers have resigned for alleged corruption or for public statements that enraged voters; one minister committed suicide.
Records for 50 million social security accounts got lost, with payments to pensioners withheld.
And Abe reopened a festering wound by asserting that "comfort women" were not forced into prostitution to serve Japanese soldiers in World War II.
Consequently, Abe's approval rating, which was 70 percent shortly after he took office, has taken a long but bumpy slide to less than 30 percent today.
If Abe is able to ride through the election and rebuild his administration, he will be confronted with at least four issues in foreign policy and national security:
The newest element on Japan's security scene is the defense minister, Yuriko Koike, who has just been promoted to that post from being the national security adviser to the prime minister. She is the first woman in Japan to hold that office and is thought to be politically ambitious, having joined four other political parties before entering the LDP.
Koike, a member of the lower house, is a former television news commentator and speaks English and Arabic, having studied in Cairo. She is said to be aiming at becoming the first woman to hold the prime minister's office.
Richard Halloran is a Honolulu-based journalist and former New York Times correspondent in Asia. His column appears weekly in Sunday's Focus section.