Abe's future in balance as campaign kicks off

Tokyo, July 12: Campaigning began today for a Japanese upper house election on July 29 that could cost Prime Minister Shinzo Abe his job and usher in a period of policy stagnation if his ruling bloc loses big.

Abe's ruling coalition's chances of keeping its upper house majority have dimmed because of government mishandling of pension records and a series of scandals and gaffes that forced three ministers from his cabinet, two by resigning and one by suicide.

''It is true that overall, it's very tough for the (ruling) Liberal Democratic Party,'' Toshiko Hamayotsu, acting representative of the LDP's junior coalition partner, the New Komeito party, told Reuters in an interview yesterday.

''The wind is blowing in favour of the (main opposition) Democratic Party.'' The LDP and the New Komeito need to win a total of 64 seats to keep their majority in the upper house, where half of the 242 seats come up for grabs. The New Komeito is aiming for 13 seats.

The Democrats are touting the upper house poll as a step towards taking power. ''A huge political battle has begun that will become the first step towards greatly altering our country's politics,'' the party said in a statement today.

A loss by the ruling camp would not automatically require Abe to step down, since the lower house picks the prime minister.

Abe, at 52 Japan's youngest prime minister since World War Two, won kudos early on for improving chilly ties with China. But he has since seen his public support ratings slashed to some 30 per cent, about half the level when he took office last September.

A Matter Of Scale

A staunch ally of the United States, Abe has pledged to rewrite the pacifist constitution and boost Japan's global security profile, a change Washington would welcome.

He also wants to lead the country out of a ''post-World War Two regime'' that conservatives argue overemphasised Japan's wartime wrongdoing and stressed individualism at the expense of traditional values such as public service and patriotism.

But he has had little scope to pitch that agenda amid the furore over pensions, public concern over political corruption and doubts about his leadership.

One cabinet minister resigned in December over a political spending scandal, the health minister barely kept his post after referring to women as ''birth-giving machines'', and the scandal-tainted farm minister hanged himself in May.

Then last week the defence minister stepped down over remarks that appeared to condone the 1945 US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and now Agriculture Minister Norihiko Akagi is under fire over reports that he falsely booked millions of yen in spending for political offices that no longer exist.

Akagi has denied any wrongdoing.

If the ruling coalition wins at least 55 seats, including 45 for the LDP, analysts say the soft-spoken, stylish Abe can probably keep his job and cobble together a majority by wooing independents, disaffected Democrats or lawmakers from a small conservative party, the People's New Party.

But a big defeat would make it hard to enact laws and would put pressure on Abe to resign, as then prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto did after losing a 1998 upper house poll.

That could return Japan to the short-lived governments seen in the 1990s and siphon lawmakers' energy from policy-making to political jockeying, analysts say.

The New Komeito's Hamayotsu said a big loss for the ruling camp could even trigger a snap election for the lower house, although no general election need be held until 2009, and spark a rejigging of political allegiances among Democrats and the LDP.

The Democratic Party groups together former LDP lawmakers, one-time Socialists and younger conservatives. Its leader, Ichiro Ozawa, suffers from an image as an old-style backroom fixer ill at ease in modern, media-driven politics.

Reuters>