Word: reformer
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...That disengagement-and his own conciliatory nature-might have led Abe to take too light a hand with his ministerial team. Despite promises that he would centralize power in the Prime Minister's office, bureaucrats have recovered some of the influence they'd lost under Koizumi's reform-minded administration. Abe's own ministers have fallen into scandal after scandal. By July 8 even one of Abe's substitute ministers-Agriculture Minister Norihiko Akagi, named to replace the late Matsuoka-was mired in a fresh campaign-funding scandal. "He's just not any good at picking his team," says...
...their owners, the DPJ used the pension scandal to hammer Abe, who seemed slow to realize its importance. The strategy played to the fears of a Japanese public worried about the viability of their pensions given the country's aging, declining population. Abe belatedly pushed through bills to reform the inefficient SIA, but the pension scandal seemed to prove that the Prime Minister couldn't govern. "The LDP leadership failed to act," says Taro Kono, an LDP Diet member. "And now we have to pay the debt...
...have to go," Kono says. The likely successor would be Foreign Minister Taro Aso, who finished a distant second to Abe in last September's LDP presidential contest and who covets the top job. But the stern Aso-a conservative who prefers foreign policy to the minutiae of economic reform-just seems like a less likable Abe, and some party members wonder whether a leadership switch would be worth the trouble. "How much of the situation would change?" says former Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda, whose own name has been floated as a replacement...
...political jungle, up close and unconfined in a north London garden. As Tony Blair's director of communications and strategy, and for years his most trusted adviser, Alastair Campbell stalked the corridors of Westminster, commanding fear and demanding respect. His influence was immense, shaping Blair's political project to reform the Labour Party and ensuring its success. He was eyewitness to crucial decisions in foreign policy and a catalyst in others, treating world leaders with the bruising directness he meted out to his own colleagues. Depicted in the Oscar-winning film The Queen as a boorish bully and in numerous...
...troops to stem the violence and give Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki a chance to unify the different Iraqi factions behind his government. "The almost complete lack of progress since the surge began on the part of the Maliki government suggests that it has... made reform less likely," Collins said...