Abe's crushing defeat

Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) suffered a crushing defeat in upper house elections. Together with its coalition party New Komeito, the LDP only managed to grab 46 seats as it needed 64 seats to keep it majority in the House of Councillors. Half of the upper house's 242 were up fro grabs in Sunday's election. Former prime ministers who suffered similar defeats stepped down, but Abe declared that he would cling to power as his LDP still has a majority in the lower house. But his LDP colleagues will start getting nervous. They don't want to see a similar defeat at the next elections. While the Japanese parliament cannot force Shinzo Abe from power, the LDP could by choosing a new chairman.

Abe's government wanted to ramp up nationalist sentiment by embellishing Japan's past, rewriting the pacifist constitution and giving its army more leeway in missions abroad. The majority of the Japanese people don't care about this. They care about bread-and-butter topics like the economy, pensions, wages and unemployment. The opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) cleverly played up these themes and won big in the upper house. Now it will be able to delay or even block legislation tabled by the LDP.

Except for an 11 month intermezzo, the LDP has been continuously in power since its founding in 1955. The Japanese people want change. Shinzo Abe is paying the price. After 10 months in office, he is struggling to pass the one year mark. (The New York Times: “Governing Party in Japan Suffers Election Defeat”) (The Times: “Revenge of the middle classes sends Japan’s ruling party to historic defeat”) (The Guardian: “Japanese PM vows to stay despite poll disaster”)

Will Abe do a Nixon?

Will he or won’t he do a Nixon, that’s the question!

Japan’s newly appointed prime minister Shinzo Abe arrived in Beijing to a courteous welcome by president Hu, NPC chairman Wu and premier Wen. It is a highly symbolic visit, the first summit meeting between the leaders of the two countries since October 2001. The Chinese government turned its back on Abe’s predecessor Junichiro Koizumi because he stubbornly kept on visiting the Yasukuni Shrine. Abe is even more right-wing than Koizumi, so where’s the logic?

“Two years from now, we might look back on this and say ‘Look, he did a Nixon’”, the Dutch China-guru Willem van Kemenade told the Associated Press. Right-winger Nixon made a bold move by visiting Chairman Mao in Beijing in 1972 and paved the way for the restoration of relations between the U.S. and China.

Relations between China and Japan have deteriorated to rock bottom. Will Abe succeed in turning the tide and make his visit not only symbolic but also historic? We’ll know in two years time.

Willem must have been flattered by being called a sinologist in the AP dispatch. He surely knows a Chinese swear word or two. Does that make one a sinologist? Never mind, Willem definitely has a way to coin an expression: “Did you do a Nixon today?”.