Word: abely
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Today that ambition has turned to ashes, Abe is poised to make a humiliating exit from power, and, as a result, Japanese politics has been thrown into disarray. Less than two days after delivering a policy speech to open the new Diet, Abe abruptly announced that he would resign. At a press conference, an emotional Abe acknowledged that he had lost public support, and that a different leader might be able to carry Japan out of the political quagmire his deep unpopularity had created. "I've decided to create a new situation by resigning," the 52-year-old Abe told...
Japan had been anticipating Abe's resignation since he led the LDP to an historic loss in legislative elections at the end of July, which left the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in control of the Diet's Upper House for the first time in the country's history. His popularity had plummeted from a high of near 70% when he took power last September to below 30% in recent polls, after many his scandal-ridden aides began resigning. "The true nature of the LDP - a dying body on life support - has been exposed," says Japanese political analyst Hirotada...
...timing of Abe's departure was a shock in a nation where politics are usually as predictable as the train schedules. At the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Sydney on Sept. 9, Abe told reporters that he was wagering his job on his ability to pass controversial legislation that would renew Japanese naval support for U.S. and coalition forces operating in Afghanistan. The deadline for the Afghanistan bill's passage is Nov. 1, and the opposition DPJ had declared its intention to block the law, setting up a direct face-off with the LDP - one that Abe, who liked...
...sagging public support means that the next Prime Minister will almost certainly be forced to call early polls. Barring a new leader who can engineer a miracle turnaround - something none of the well-worn LDP candidates seem capable of - the party could well be tossed out of government altogether. "Abe has thrown the LDP into a desperate state from which it will never recover," wrote Glenn Maguire, Asia Pacific Chief Economist at Societe Generale in Hong Kong, in a report today...
More broadly, Abe's resignation spells the end of an attempt among more conservative members of the LDP to loosen the bounds of postwar pacifism and forge a true military alliance with the U.S. That change gathered momentum under Abe's popular predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, who committed Japanese forces to assisting the U.S. in anti-terror operations - including in Iraq - and made noises about revising Japan's constitutional restrictions on military activity. (Japanese troops are allowed to act only in self-defense.) When he came to power, Abe made constitutional revision one of his top priorities, and kept...