Shinzo Abe: Who was the former prime minister who was assassinated – Abenomics and the clumsy handling of the coronavirus

The former Prime Minister of Japan with the longest term in office, 67-year-old Shinzo Abe, was murdered in cold blood today during a pre-election speech. Abe has attempted to pull Japan’s economy out of chronic deflation with his bold policy, known as Abenomics, to bolster the military and counter China’s growing power, and has been criticized for his clumsy handling of the pandemic.

Abe, who resigned in 2020, was attacked by Nara City resident Tetsuya Yamagami. According to Japanese media the attacker is a former member of the Japanese Navy and was unhappy with the former prime minister.

Abe from MP he first became prime minister in 2006 and remained in office for just one year. He then ran for prime minister again, a rarity for the country, in 2012 with a pledge to revive the stagnant economy, loosen the boundaries of the pacifist post-war Constitution and restore traditional values.

He was instrumental in taking over the hosting of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics long harboring a desire to preside over the Games. He even appeared as the Nintendo video game character Super Mario when Tokyo took over from Rio to host the Games in 2016.

Abe became Japan’s longest-serving prime minister in November 2019, but after the summer of 2020 support for him declined because of his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also a series of scandals, including the arrest of the former Minister of Justice.

He resigned in September of that year without achieving his long-held goals of revising the Constitution or presiding over the Games, an event that was moved to 2021 because of the pandemic. But he remained a dominant figure in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, controlling one of its key factions.

When he was killed he was campaigning for the upper house elections scheduled for Sunday.

Abenomics

THE Shinzo Abe took office as prime minister for the first time in 2006 and he was the country’s youngest prime minister after World War II. After a year marked by political scandals, voter anger over lost pension records and the election defeat of his ruling party, Abe resigned citing health problems reports APE-MPE, citing Reuters.

“What worries me most now is that because of my resignation, the conservative ideals that the Abe government cultivated will be extinguished. From now on, I want to sacrifice myself as a parliamentarian who will make true conservatism take root in Japan,” he wrote in Bungei Shunju magazine.

Five years after his resignation, which he attributed to an intestinal ailment, ulcerative colitis, Abe led his conservative Liberal Democratic Party, which had lost it in 2009, to power.

He then presented his three-pronged strategy, Abenomics, to fight deflation and boost economic growth with easy monetary policy and fiscal spending, combined with structural reform to deal with a rapidly aging and shrinking population.

Deflation has proved persistent, however, and Abe’s growth strategy has been hit in 2019 by a consumption tax hike and a Sino-US trade war. Next year his pandemic coronavirus triggered the worst recession Japan’s economy has ever suffered.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Abe closed Japan’s borders and imposed a state of emergency on the country, telling citizens to stay indoors and closing shops. His critics initially called Abe’s management clumsy and later accused him of a lack of leadership.

When he resigned, citing the same health problem, the country’s death rate from COVID-19 was much lower than in many other developed countries.

A scion of a rich family

Abe was the scion of a wealthy political family, which includes a foreign minister father and a brother of his grandfather who had served as prime minister.

But when it comes to many policies, his grandfather, the late Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, seems to have had the most value. Kishi was a government minister during the war and had been imprisoned but never tried as a war criminal after World War II.

He served as prime minister from 1957 to 1960 and resigned amid popular outcry over the renegotiation of a US-Japan security agreement.

Kishi tried unsuccessfully to revise the 1947 constitution that Japan had drawn up with the US to make the country an equal security partner with the US and to adopt more assertive diplomacy, issues that were also central to Abe’s political agenda.

Abe has boosted defense spending and reached out to other Asian nations to counter its growing power China. The basis of his political agenda was to escape the postwar regime, as he called it, a legacy of American occupation that, conservatives say, is robbing Japan of its national pride.

Reforming education to restore traditional morals was another goal of his. Abe also took a less apologetic stance on Japan’s actions during World War II, saying future generations should stop apologizing for past mistakes.

Tough attitude

He was first elected to parliament in 1993 after the death of his father and gained a reputation in the country for taking a tough stance toward unpredictable neighbor North Korea in a dispute over Japanese citizens abducted by Pyongyang decades ago.

Although Abe has also sought to improve ties with China and South Korea, where bitter war memories remain, he angered both neighbors in 2013 when he visited the Yasukuni memorial, which is considered by those two countries symbol of Japan’s militaristic past. In the following years, he avoided visiting the monument in person and chose to send a wreath.

Abe forged close ties with the US president Donald Trumpwith whom he played golf, had frequent phone calls and meetings.

He was re-elected president of his party for a third consecutive three-year term in 2018 after a change in the party’s constitution, and until the coronavirus emerged, some within the party were considering another change in the constitution to allow Abe to serve a fourth term.

The moment of the murder