Gwynne Dyer: Shinzo Abe gambles by calling a snap election in Japan
“I need to hear the voice of the people,” said Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. “I will step down if we fail to keep our majority because that would mean our Abenomics is rejected.” And with that feeble excuse he announced that he was calling an election two years earlier than necessary, on December 14.
“Abenomics”, the prime minister’s drastic strategy for kick-starting Japan out of 20 years of deflation and economic stagnation, has not actually been rejected by the public, but it is failing nevertheless.
After an initial burst of growth last year, Japan has fallen into a recession despite the trillions of yen that the central bank has pumped into the economy.
Japanese voters would love to see “Abenomics” succeed. It’s no fun living in a no-growth economy, and Abe’s plan was the first they had seen in a long time that had even a chance of turning that around.
But two years in the kick-start has stalled, and Abe’s public approval rating recently fell below 50 percent for the first time. Maybe he’s just going for another four years now because he fears that later the prospects will be even worse.
To be fair to the prime minister, “Abenomics” didn’t actually cause the recession. The problem was that Abe raised the sales tax from 5 percent to 8 percent last April, in obedience to a law passed by the previous government. Unfortunately, Japanese consumers responded by cutting their spending, especially on big-ticket items—and so the economy tumbled into recession.
Abe has learned his lesson, and he is now promising that the scheduled second rise in the sales tax next year, from 8 percent to 10 percent, will be postponed until 2017 if he wins the election. In fact, he is portraying the election as a referendum on whether the public wants him to kill the next tax rise—as if they were likely to demand that he go ahead with it.
If he can keep the debate centred on the economy, Abe should cruise to an easy victory, for the opposition parties are divided and disorganized and have no plausible alternative solution. However, if the focus shifts to Abe’s plans to restart the country’s nuclear power stations and remove the pacifist elements from the Japanese constitution, the election’s outcome will get much harder to predict.
On the nuclear issue, as on the sales tax, Abe is doing the sensible thing. Nuclear power used to provide 30 percent of Japan’s electrical power, and the shutdown of all the country’s reactors has compelled it to spend huge amounts of money on imported energy.
It’s now high time to turn the nuclear reactors on again. But the Japanese public, post-Fukushima, has an acute nuclear allergy, and the opposition to re-starting the reactors is large, vocal, and well-organized. If that becomes a central election issue, Abe will lose a lot of votes.
And then there’s the constitutional question. Abe has long detested the constitution, written by Americans during the post-1945 occupation, that forbids Japan to send military forces abroad. He says he wants to rewrite it to allow Japan to send its troops to the aid of allies who are under attack. His critics see it as the entering wedge for a full-scale remilitarization of the country.
“The global situation surrounding Japan is getting ever more difficult,” Abe said in a televised press conference last summer, in an attempt to justify his proposed constitutional changes. He was really talking about the growing tension and even hostility between Tokyo and Beijing, of course, and China’s Xinhua news agency replied with an editorial that verged on the hysterical.
Abe is “leading his country on a dangerous path” by “gutting the constitution,” Xinhua wrote. “No matter how Abe glosses over it, he is dallying with the spectre of war.” And it really doesn’t help that some of Abe’s hard-right friends and political associates dabble in anti-Chinese invective and deny Japan’s war crimes before and during the Second World War.
There are a great many people in Japan who find this attempt to change the constitution frightening. Nobody knows exactly how many (it depends on how the opinion pollsters pose the question), but it may well be a majority. So Abe really needs to keep this from becoming the dominant issue in the election.
The fact that it will be a relatively short campaign helps Abe, but if these two issues catch fire he will be in serious difficulty. It’s unlikely that his Liberal Democratic Party, in power for 53 of the past 59 years, will actually lose control of the Lower House of the Diet, but it could lose enough seats to force him to drop his nuclear and constitutional projects.
And there is an outside chance that he could actually lose the election.
Comments
15 Comments
I Chandler
Nov 20, 2014 at 12:14pm
DYER: "Abe has long detested the constitution, written by Americans during the post-1945 occupation, that forbids Japan to send military forces abroad."
The US also wrote the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the US and Japan. Abes grandfather ( Nobusuke Kishi ) signed the treaty, precipitating his resignation as PM. His grandfather was also a WW2 war criminal. He wouldn't be the first politician that has skeletons in the closet:
http://www.familyofsecrets.com
Abe wrote "people used to point to my grandfather (Nobusuke Kishi) as a ‘Class-A war criminal".
Unlike Tōjō (and other cabinet members), Kishi was released and was never indicted or tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinz%C5%8D_Abe#Early_life
I Chandler
Nov 20, 2014 at 3:38pm
DYER:" It’s unlikely that his LDP, in power for 53 of 59 years, will actually lose the Lower House"
Unfortunately, Dyer doesn't try to explain that electoral success story:
Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes describes how Abes grandfather ( Nobusuke Kishi ) set up the LDP with the help of CIA cash; LDP candidates and officials are recruited,approved and bribed by the CIA. The one weapon the CIA used with surpassing skill was cold cash. The Japanese described the political system created with CIA support as "structural corruption".
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/aug/11/usnationalbookawards.politics
P.Peto
Nov 20, 2014 at 3:47pm
The Japanese political and economic problem is really just a symptom of a global economic malaise. Gwynne Dyer readers are reminded twice weekly of serious local political, social and economic problems which are getting worse and that are probably leading to systemic breakdown of the current world order.
Superficial remedies like a snap Japanese election [or printing more Yen] will not solve their problems but will rather exacerbate them under a Right wing Nationalist like Abe. The European Union is in crisis with high unemployment, deflation leading to the rise of radical right nationalist parties. The US political system [Duopoly]is hopelessly dysfunctional due to corporate corruption, etc. resulting in widespread income inequality, unemployment and racial tension. The 2008 bank crises has not been solved by printing money, the country is bankrupt and another financial calamity is immanent. US elites have militarized their police forces, created a national security state and are expecting major social unrest in the wake of another financial breakdown. Moreover the have ratcheted up the propaganda and war machines in order to go to war when they lose control of their population. An external threat and war is the recipe for binding the people to their elites in time of crises. World wars happen when global power systems collapse after which a new world order is established by the victors. We are living in ominous times prepare yourself accordingly.
James Garrett
Nov 20, 2014 at 10:41pm
hm hm ... OR,
Following the election, the LDP can look to ditch it's conservative yet military-wary Buddhist coalition partner in favour of the hard right. That would allow them to charge quickly forward with re-militarization. There seem to be inklings of discomfort between the LDP and Komeito already and a billowing right wing presence in the Diet.
McRetso
Nov 21, 2014 at 7:23am
@ P. Peto
A third world war is incredibly unlikely.
Basically, we don't live in the same kind of world as we did when the first two happened. WWI and to some extent WWII were facilitated by mutual misunderstandings and miscommunications between the warring parties. Instant communication between world leaders is the norm now, which makes crises much easier to solve.
Related to this, we live in a global economy. If you want something your neighbour has, you can usually buy it for less money than it would cost to invade them and steal it.
Nuclear weapons have, since about 1949, made it virtually impossible to predict the result of a general war between nuclear-armed states. States generally only fight wars they think they can win, and its really hard to win a nuclear war.
Finally, conventional armies are increasingly expensive. Only the US has sufficient conventional capability to project its power around the world, and even Washington has shied away from full-scale military deployments since 2003. The US now prefers to fight small wars where allied countries provide the ground troops and the US supports from the air. The EU and Russia are too weak in conventional terms to have any hope of conquering each other, though Russia can beat up its neighbours and France is quite capable of intervening in Africa. Economic problems in both make it unlikely that Russian or EU military spending will increase much. China's military is large, but it is designed for local conflicts in its region and poorly suited to fighting big wars on the other side of the world.
Paige Nelson
Nov 21, 2014 at 10:11am
They would save millions if they stopped whaling.
The Next One
Nov 21, 2014 at 10:34am
@McResto
When Christian fundamentalist whack jobs control all organs of the US government, logic will go out the window and misunderstandings and miscommunications will be irrelevant. The only relevant information will be found in the Bible, especially Revelations, which will serve to guide US policy.
McRetso
Nov 21, 2014 at 6:16pm
@The Next One
You would probably have to substantiate the idea that there was a serious risk of the US government being entirely controlled by religious whack jobs. The US government is a really big, clumsy, bureaucratically inert organization. It tends to favour the status quo both domestically and internationally.
It's quite possible to conceive of the elected representatives of the US being predominantly religious nuts for a four-year cycle or two, but it takes more than that to create a significant, lasting shift in policy aims. Look at the Bush administration; they were basically the religious nuts you're worried about, and all it took was one political and military disaster in Iraq for their whole foreign policy project to be discredited and abandoned.
Greg G.
Nov 22, 2014 at 5:24am
@McResto It's not inconceivable that the current trouble in the Middle East could slowly develop into an all-out Sunni vs. Shia regional war pulling in Iran (which Russia is cozying up to) and Saudi Arabia, which could also easily then spill over into Turkey (a NATO country), etc.
Major world-changing wars can start off very small, and slowly grow in proportion, and historically they haven't necessarily started off with hostilities between major players (which can be drawn in at later stages as things escalate). The state of the world right now has some disturbing similarities to the era of the late 1800s to just prior to the outbreak of the First World War.
McRetso
Nov 22, 2014 at 7:32am
@Greg G.
"The state of the world right now has some disturbing similarities to the era of the late 1800s to just prior to the outbreak of the First World War."
No it doesn't. Or at least not the kind of similarities that would lead to a similar outcome.
You need credible offensive military capability to start a world war. NATO, Russia, and China all have nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons make the use of offensive military capability against their owner impossible. Nukes are the ultimate deadlock on military conquest. The system has really changed. It doesn't matter what happens in the middle east; nobody will risk a nuclear war over it.