Abe Wins: Mandate by Default?

gulf-times.com

In this race, the key to Abe’s victory seemed to be, again, swing voters, as has been case with recent national elections. 

An exit poll by Kyodo News showed the LDP had retained the support of the unaffiliated voters who helped the party return to power in the previous Lower House election, in December 2012. 

About 20.6 percent of the respondents said they supported no particular party. Of them, 21.1 percent said they voted for the LDP, up 1.2 points from 2012. This seemed to be the factor that helped the LDP score a landslide victory. 

Still, even among those swing voters, no strong enthusiasm for Abe was seen during the election. Observers pointed to the lack of viable opposition parties, not positive support for Abe and his LDP, as the reason for the ruling bloc’s huge victory this time.
In fact, voter turnout rate was likely to sink to a record-low of around 52 percent, down around 7 points from the 2012 election, according to an estimate by NHK as of Sunday night. 

“I didn’t feel any enthusiasm or excitement (from voters) until the very end,” said Shinjiro Koizumi, a son of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi who won re-election Sunday.

More @ The Japan Times

The bottom line was this: despite all his achievements, Abe’s popularity began to wane dramatically from this summer on because he did not achieve what he was elected to achieve. With only two years ahead of him, he chose to prolong his term in office, claiming he needed a renewal of his mandate because he had decided to postpone the planned increase of the consumption tax hike. He ran on his promise of 2012 and on the slogan, “There’s no way but this” (reminiscent of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s often repeated statement that there was “no alternative” to her policies). Abe’s victory was a given, because the snap election called for 14 December allowed only an electoral campaign period of 12 days, and the opposition was in disarray. In the end, with only some 52 percent of the elctorate bothering to vote at all, according to the last tally he lost only five seats, with his coalition partner – Komeito – gaining four, so that Abe’s coalition with 325 seats out of 480 still holds their two-thirds majority. “We don’t have much time”, Abe told The Economist on 5 December. But he now has four years’ time once again, with only one major task remaining: getting that “third arrow” off the bowstring and getting the economy right. If he does not, he will be remembered as a prime minister who had singular opportunities, singularly missed.

More @ ECFR

Household incomes have fallen for 13th months in a row while more people are struggling with job insecurity, government reports showed. 

“Some young people have a hard time finding even a low-wage and unstable job once they lose one,” said Hiroki Kubokawa, a social worker at the Hotplus nonprofit in Saitama city in the suburbs of Tokyo. 

The depreciation of the yen has driven up import costs, which hit the lives of many people hard, especially low-income earners, Kubokawa said. 

More evacuees of the tsunami-induced 2011 nuclear disaster are also hard-pressed to make ends meet because of a lack of government support, said Seiichi Nakate, a leader of residents who have evacuated from areas near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. 

Abe’s LDP; its junior coalition partner, New Komeito; and major media failed to discuss their plight and the fallout of the triple meltdown at the plant in the run-up to the elections, Nakate said. 

Abe has been criticised for his eagerness to restart nuclear reactors and export nuclear technologies abroad even though more than 100,000 people still cannot return home because of radioactive contamination from the accident.

More @ Gulf Times

“This is not so much a vote of confidence in Abe and the LDP as a vote of no-confidence in the political opposition,” Professor Gerry Curtis of Columbia University told Reuters.
Many voters had questioned the need for an election midway through Abe’s first term. The prime minister had described the snap election as a referendum on Abenomics – his three-pronged strategy of cheap credit, public investment and structural reforms that include raising the number of women in the workforce and opening up the country’s highly protected agricultural sector. 

Sunday’s victory also gives Abe breathing room to proceed with two controversial policies: the restart of nuclear reactors, three years after the Fukushima meltdown, and expanding the military’s global reach by lifting the postwar ban on collective self-defence.

More @ The Guardian