Japan will move a step closer to electing its most nationalist leader in decades on Wednesday if, as expected, Shinzo Abe succeeds Junichiro Koizumi as leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic party.
Abe, the chief Cabinet secretary, is widely seen as Koizumi’s heir-apparent and recent opinion polls give him a comfortable lead over his rivals, the Foreign Minister, Taro Aso, and the Finance Minister, Sadakazu Tanigaki.
The winner will be confirmed as prime minister in the lower house of the Diet, where the LDP holds a comfortable majority, on September 26.
An opinion poll published on Tuesday in the Nihon Keizai financial daily gave Abe 36%, well ahead of Aso on 20% and Tanigaki on 15%. His lead is bigger among party delegates, who will cast their votes on Wednesday.
Abe, who will become the first Japanese prime minister born after the war, has promised to pick apart much of the legacy of the United States postwar occupation.
Although he wants to strengthen security ties with the US and shares Washington’s concerns over China’s military build-up, he has vowed to make wholesale changes to Japan’s antiwar Constitution, drawn up by the Americans after the war, to enable Japanese troops to come to the aid of allies and to use force when taking part in international peacekeeping operations.
He is also expected to resurrect Japan’s bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, which has faltered in the face of Chinese opposition. ”We must shift our foreign policy so that Japan, as a leader, will participate in the rulemaking and the ground-setting,” he said in a recent debate.
Abe’s impeccable hawkish credentials are already causing alarm among Japan’s neighbours. The alarm bells are ringing loudest in China, whose relations with Japan sank to their lowest point in decades after Koizumi made his first trip as leader to a nationalist shrine in Tokyo in 2001.
Abe supported Koizumi’s pilgrimages to Yasukuni shrine, which honours Japan’s war dead, among them 14 class A war criminals, but refuses to say whether he would visit as prime minister.
His aides are reportedly trying to arrange a fence-mending meeting between Abe and the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, on the sidelines of a regional summit in Vietnam in November.
Doubts remain over Abe’s commitment to the economic reforms started by Koizumi. One of the chief architects of those reforms, the Economics Minister, Heizo Takenaka, said he would leave politics when Koizumi steps down and return to academia.
Abe has also voiced concern about the income gap that has opened up in five years of neo-liberal economic policies under the Koizumi administration.
”You cannot stop the reforms, but you have also to address the issue of the gap between rich and poor,” Seiko Hashimoto, an LDP member of the upper house, told the Associated Press. ”Abe stands somewhere in the middle.”
Victory would complete an astonishing rise to the top of Japanese politics for a man who entered Parliament 13 years ago and who was given his first Cabinet post only a year ago.
Abe (51) hails from illustrious political stock. His maternal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, was jailed — though never charged — as a war criminal and went on to become prime minister in the late 1950s.
His father, Shintaro, served as foreign minister but was one of several senior politicians implicated in the Recruit insider trading and corruption scandal that shook Japan in the late 1980s. – Guardian Unlimited Â