Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, buoyed by a huge election win for lawmakers who favor revising the nation’s post-war, pacifist constitution, yesterday signaled a push toward his long-held goal, but is going to need to convince a divided public to succeed.
Parties in favor of amending the US-drafted charter won nearly 80 percent of the seats in Sunday’s lower house election, media counts showed.
That left the small, new Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDPJ) as the biggest group opposed to Abe’s proposed changes.
Formed by liberal members of the Democratic Party, which imploded before the election and no longer exists in the lower house, the CDPJ won 55 seats, a final count by public broadcaster NHK shows. That is a fraction of the ruling bloc’s two-thirds majority of 313 seats in the 465-member chamber.
Abe said he wanted to get other parties on board, including Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike’s new conservative Party of Hope, and was not insisting on a target of changing the constitution by 2020, which he floated this year.
“We won a two-thirds majority as the ruling bloc, but it is necessary to strive to form a wide-ranging agreement among the ruling bloc and opposition [to revise the constitution],” Abe told a news conference yesterday at his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) headquarters.
“And then we aim to win the understanding of the people, so that we can gain a majority in a referendum,” Abe said.
He stopped short of claiming to have won a mandate for amending the constitution in the election.
Abe also vowed to make education and childcare a priority over ambitious fiscal reforms.
He promised to offer free pre-school for all children aged three to five and for children aged two or below from low-income households.
“The key to Japan’s sustainable growth is how we respond to ageing of the population, which is the biggest challenge for Abenomics,” he told the news conference. “We aim to exit deflation by accelerating wage growth through innovation on productivity.”
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