Abe’s complicated legacy looms large for current Japan PM

TOKYO: Assassinated former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was perhaps the most divisive leader in recent Japanese history, infuriating liberals with his revisionist views of history and his dreams of military expansion. He was also the longest serving and, by many estimations, the most influential.

For current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, this complicated legacy will loom large as he considers taking up his mentor’s unachieved policy goals after a big win for their ruling Liberal Democratic Party in parliamentary elections Sunday, just days after Abe’s death.

Kishida has gained considerable political strength, riding a surge of emotion and vows of resilience from voters after the assassination, but he’s also lost the most powerful force in his party — Abe.

“Kishida now faces an increasingly murky political situation,” the liberal-leaning Asahi newspaper said in an editorial. “The death of Abe, who headed the largest LDP wing, will certainly change the party’s power balance.”

Kishida made his immediate priorities clear after the election: “Party unity is more important than anything else.”

But he must also make quick progress on growing worries over rising prices and a stagnant economy even as he tries to figure out how to boost Japan’s defense in the face of an aggressive China, Russia and North Korea.

And then there’s Abe’s polarizing nationalistic agenda, much of which was left unfinished, including his attempts to boost patriotism in schools, to revoke the apologies made in the 1990s over Japanese aggression during the war and the controversial and divisive plan to revise Japan’s war-renouncing constitution to give the military more power.

How Kishida deals with Abe’s still considerable political presence may determine his success as a leader.

At the heart of Abe’s lingering influence – he left the top job in 2020 – is a paradox. He alienated many in Japan, as well as war victims China and the Koreas, with his hawkish foreign and security policies, as well as his ultraconservative – sometimes revisionist -stance on the so-called history issues related to Japan’s wartime actions.

Abe pushed back against post-World War II treaties and the verdicts of the tribunal that judged Japanese war criminals and was a driving force in efforts to whitewash military atrocities and end apologies over the war.

The Japanese electorate, however, carried him to power in six elections. And his work to strengthen the alliance with the United States and to unify like-minded democracies as a counterweight to China’s assertiveness endeared him to U.S. and European elites.

His long grip on power even amid criticism over his more extreme views can be explained by voters’ desire for stability and an improved economy, Abe’s stranglehold on the conservative wing of his party and the haplessness of the opposition.

His first period as prime minister, which began in 2006, ended in failure after a year, partly because of a backlash to his nationalist policy goals.

After three years of opposition rule, a rare interruption in decades of LDP dominance, Abe returned to power with a landslide victory in 2012.

-AP