REVIEW - Abe Becomes Japan's Longest-Serving Prime Minister: His Path, Challenges And Legacy

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th November, 2019) OSCOW, November 20 (Sputnik), Valentina Shvartsman - Shinzo Abe, the president of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, became the longest-serving prime minister in Japanese history on Wednesday, having held the office for 2,887 days and suppressed the all-time record set by Taro Katsura, who served as Japan's prime minister more than a century ago.

An heir to a very prominent political family, Abe was destined to follow in the footsteps of his maternal grandfather Nobusuke Kishi, who was Japan's prime minister from 1957 to 1960, and father Shintaro Abe, who served as foreign minister from 1982 to 1986.

Abe started off as a member of the Japanese parliament's lower chamber in 1993, soon climbing the career ladder up to the position of the deputy chief cabinet secretary under Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori. He retained the post after Junichiro Koizumi came to power in April 2001. In Koizumi's cabinet, Abe asserted himself as a chief negotiator with North Korea on the matter of Japanese abductees. In 2002, he accompanied Koizumi to Pyongyang for a summit with then North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to pressure for the return of Japanese citizens taken by North Korea. Pyongyang subsequently returned five of them.

In 2005, Abe was promoted to the position of chief cabinet secretary and became heir apparent to Koizumi. In April 2006, he was elected as the president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). In July 2006, he finally peaked, becoming the youngest prime minister in the post-war history.

Alas, he failed to gear up popular support for his party to win the upper house elections in 2007 and stepped down after less than one year into tenure. Abe later cited health problems as the reason behind his resignation. He was succeeded by a string of five prime ministers � LDP's Yasuo Fukuda and Taro Aso, and then Yukio Hatoyama, Naoto Kan and Yoshihiko Noda of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) � each of whom failed to retain office for more than 16 months.

SECOND TENURE AS PRIME MINISTER AND CHALLENGES

Abe rose to power again after the LDP's landslide victory in the 2012 elections. His comeback began with a pledge of the revitalization of the Japanese economy.

"Japan is not, and will never be, a Tier Two Country. That is the core message I am here to make. And I reiterate this by saying, I am back, and so shall Japan," Abe said in his address to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington in February 2013.

His government then embarked on the "three-arrow" economic strategy referred to as Abenomics, which focused on monetary easing, flexible fiscal policy and structural reforms. While remedying Japan's stock market, the strategy has not healed the nation's economy in a broader sense, Purnendra Jain, a professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Adelaide, noted in his comments to Sputnik.

"Domestically, he focused on economic growth through his Abenomics which has worked in a limited way, e.g. recovery of the stock market. But the overall economy is suffering and there are no clear pathways offered by the Abe government," Jain said.

But rather than this, the image of the LDP and Abe's own support rates were damaged by a string of scandals, controversy and favoritism allegations from the opposition in the past several years. These included the resignation of Defense Minister Tomomi Inada over a cover-up of reports on the Japanese peacekeeping mission in South Sudan in 2017; the scandal over a land sale to the private Moritomo Gakuen school same year; and a favoritism scandal over alleged preferential treatment to another school, Kake Gakuen, run by Abe's friend Kotaro Kake, in 2018. The fresh cronyism scandal, involving the politician's alleged violation of the election law by inviting "too many" of his supporters to the state-funded cherry blossom party, broke out just days before he suppressed the record 2,886 days in office.

Despite a number of setbacks over the past seven years, Abe has managed not only to always secure his party's victory in parliamentary elections, but also to fight off any opposition within the LDP and retain his position as the party's president. Moreover, in 2017, the LDP changed the rules that limited the party's president to two terms, which paved a way for Abe's third term set to expire in September 2021 and allowed him to become the longest-serving prime minister in the country's history.

Dwelling on the reasons that helped Abe to retain office for so long, James Brown, an associate professor and academic program coordinator for international affairs at the Temple University Japan Campus, pointed to the politician's "luck."

"It has been his fortune to come to power at a time when the opposition parties are especially weak. This is because the Democratic Party of Japan is perceived to have failed in government between 2009 and 2012.

Abe has therefore succeeded in presenting his government as stable in comparison with what he describes as the 'nightmare' of rule under the DPJ," Brown said in comments to Sputnik.

Another element of Abe's luck, according to the expert, is lack of credible rivals within the ruling party itself.

"In previous eras, the prime minister often faced significant competition from other powerful figures within the LDP. These rival LDP politicians often sought to force out the prime minister so that they could seize the top job. Since Abe returned to the top job in 2012, there have been few serious infra-party rivals," he said.

With less than two years left until the expiry of his third term, Abe is now faced with the need to leave some legacy by achieving at least some of his pivotal � and rather ambitious � goals.

Among them is the return of Japanese abductee, the issue that he had worked on as the chief secretary of Koizumi's cabinet. Despite his repeatedly-reaffirmed readiness for a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and calls on the United States and Russia to help facilitate such a meeting, Abe had little success so far. His criticism of North Korea's missile tests has also backfired with Pyongyang going as far as insulting the Japanese prime minister and vowing to never hold talks with him.

The long-pending peace treaty with Russia and settlement of the dispute over four southern Kuril islands are also among Abe's diplomatic endeavors. Last November, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Abe agreed to accelerate peace treaty talks based on the 1956 Soviet-Japanese joint declaration, which stipulated, among other things, that Japan will regain control over two of the disputed islands � Habomai and Shikotan � following the conclusion of the peace treaty with Russia.

According to Brown, Abe has done "maximum that is politically possible" to resolve the decades-old territorial dispute with Russia, including by building up a rather warm relations with Putin and offering economic incentives to Russia's Far East. He even settled for the transfer of just two of the four disputed islands � somewhat unimaginable for his predecessors.

"Despite this, the talks have not progressed. This is because it is apparent that the Russian side has no intention of transferring any territory to Japan in the foreseeable future. It is therefore extremely unlikely that the dispute will be resolved before Abe leaves office in September 2021 (at the latest). Instead, the best that Abe can hope for is increased Japanese access to the disputed islands via expanded exchange trips and joint economic activities," the expert said.

Jain similarly pointed out to the lack of progress on the issue whatsoever despite a series of meetings over the past couple of years, noting that there were even fewer chances that anything could be achieved after Abe leaves office in 2021.

"If a settlement is not achieved during Abe-Putin governments, the prospect for any settlement in the future looks weak," he said.

Abe's another big ambition has been to revise the post-war constitution's pacifist clause, which bans maintaining any armed forces, in order to legitimize the nation's Self-Defense Forces. In 2014, he had managed to push a reinterpretation that allowed the government to dispatch troops abroad to assist allies. Even though Abe set a 2020 deadline of revising the constitution, little progress has been achieved so far in passing the amendment in the Diet. Besides, any amendment to the constitution should be approved by a national referendum, and latest polls show that the majority of Japanese citizens still oppose the move.

Even though Abe pledged in March that he would not seek another four-year term as the LDP president in 2021, James suggested that Abe still could once again try to tweak the rules to stay in power.

"Abe's succession plans remain a point of debate. One option would be for him to change the rules of the LDP to permit him to serve a fourth term as party leader. This would enable Abe to remain as prime minister until 2024," he said.

Another option for Abe is to become a "grey eminence" of sorts by selecting a weaker prime minister and continuing to pull the strings behind the scenes, according to the expert.

"This is definitely a possibility, but it will not be easy for Abe to ensure that he can retain control," Brown said.

The expert noted that Abe would need to find a successor, who would remain loyal to Abe and who would not come to overshadow him. Japanese media currently name former foreign minister Fumio Kishida, former defense minister Shigeru Ishiba, who ran against Abe for the LDP president in 2012, and Shinjiro Koizumi, a 38-year-old environment minister and son of Abe's past boss, as most likely candidates to succeed the longest-serving prime minister.