Shinzo Abe (born September 21, 1954, Tokyo, Japan) is a Japanese politician who twice served as prime minister of Japan (2006-07 and from 2012). Prominent politician who implemented both political and economic reforms.
Shinzo Abe Biography
The current Prime Minister of Japan is a member of a prominent political family. His grandfather, Kishi Nobusuke, served as Prime Minister of Japan from 1957 to 1960, and his cousin, Sato Eisaku, held the same post from 1964 to 1972. After graduating from Seikey University in Tokyo (1977), Abe moved to the United States, where he studied political science at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. In 1979, he returned to Japan and joined Kōbe Steel, Ltd. Subsequently, he became an active member of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and in 1982 began working as secretary of his father, Abe Shintaro, who was the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Japan.
Political career
In 1993, Abe took a seat in the lower house of the Sejm (parliament), and then held a number of government posts. He received great support for his tough stance on North Korea, especially after it was discovered in 2002 that she had abducted 13 Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 80s. Abe, who was then deputy chief secretary of the cabinet, led the subsequent negotiations. In 2003, he was appointed Secretary General of the LDP. Due to time constraints, Prime Minister and LDP leader Koizumi Junichiro was forced to leave his post in 2006, and Abe succeeded in replacing him in both posts. Abe became the country's first prime minister born after World War II and the youngest politician in this post after the war.
Foreign policy
In terms of foreign policy, Shinzo Abe, with conservative views, sought to strengthen ties with the United States and pursue a more persistent foreign policy. Abe supported the United Nations sanctions against North Korea after the country's nuclear tests and imposed a series of unilateral sanctions on North Korea, including a ban on all visits to Japanese ports by North Korean ships. He also promised to revise the country's post-war constitution, which imposed severe restrictions on its armed forces.
Shinzo Abe Domestic Politics
In internal affairs, the Prime Minister promised to strengthen pension and health insurance systems. However, his government soon became embroiled in a series of public and financial scandals. In addition, the administration was criticized for its slow response to a statement that the government had abused the retirement accounts of millions of citizens for a decade. In July 2007, the LDP party lost a majority in the upper house of the coalition led by the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), and in September Shinzo Abe announced that he would resign. He was succeeded by Fukuda Yasuo.
He retained his seat in the lower house of the Sejm, but for several years remained politically calm, especially after the coalition led by the DPJ took control of the government in 2009. However, everything changed when he was again elected leader of the LDP in September. One of his first actions was to visit the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, a memorial to fallen soldiers, where people convicted of war crimes during World War II were also buried. This provoked high-profile protests from other countries in the Asia-Pacific region and further controversy over his views on the sovereignty of the Pacific islands, which were disputed by China and Japan, as well as about his position in favor of revising pacifism in the Japanese constitution. However, the LDP won a stunning election victory on December 16, 2012. On December 26, the new LDP majority in the chamber, supported by members of the Komeito party, overwhelmingly endorsed Abe as prime minister. He replaced Noda Yoshihiko from the DPJ, who resigned from the post that day.
Economic program
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe quickly launched an ambitious economic program designed to stimulate a long-lived Japanese economy and help accelerate the recovery of the northeastern Honshu area (Tohoku or Ou), devastated by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The program, quickly called “Abenomika, ” included measures such as raising inflation to lower the yen against the US dollar and other foreign currencies, as well as increase the money supply and government spending on large projects. The Abe government received great political momentum in the July 2013 elections to the upper house of the Sejm, when candidates from the LDP and its allies from Komeito got enough seats to guarantee them a majority in that house.
Shinzo Abe's economic program seemed to be working at the initial stage, with significant growth in 2013 and the first half of 2014 and a subsequent decline in unemployment. However, the second stage of a three-stage increase in the national consumption tax (introduced in 2012 by the government under the leadership of the DPJ) in April 2014 contributed to a sharp decline in the Japanese economy throughout the rest of the year. By fall, the country fell into recession, and Abe's approval rating fell. He decided to dissolve the lower house and call for an urgent parliamentary election on December 14, 2014. Abe and LDP won by a wide margin. At the same time, he guaranteed that he would keep the prime minister’s cabinet. Voters, however, were not very enthusiastic, and their numbers were record low.
Constitutional reform
After a major victory in the LDP elections, the Shinzo Abe administration actively engaged in the revision of the Japanese constitution. In 2014, the cabinet approved a rethinking of the so-called peace clause of the constitution, which set the stage for the approval of bills in May 2015 that would facilitate Japan's use of military force if the country were attacked or threatened. These bills were subsequently passed to the lower house in July and the upper house in September.
