Japan's ruling coalition breathed a sigh of relief yesterday after its candidates won in local elections, but newspapers warned that the races still showed wide voter disenchantment.
Candidates supported by embattled Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won nine of Sunday's 11 elections for provincial governors that were head-to-head races with the opposition.
Tokyo's LDP-backed Governor Shintaro Ishihara, who is famous for bashing China and making other nationalist remarks, won a third term by a landslide, topping his closest competitor by 21 points in a 14-candidate race.
"We have to use [the election results] to boost ourselves," chief government spokesman Yasuhisa Shiozaki told a news conference.
"Following the results, we want to do our best to pass key legislation by uniting the ruling coalition," Shiozaki said.
The elections came three months ahead of polls for the upper house, the first nationwide parliamentary contest for Abe.
Abe, at 52 Japan's youngest post-World War II premier, is battling approval ratings below 40 percent due in part to questions about his authority after a series of scandals and gaffes involving close aides.
"The ruling coalition will be relieved by watching its candidates win," the best-selling Yomiuri Shimbun said in an editorial.
The main opposition Democratic Party "is not in good shape and it will have to make an urgent review of the situation ahead of the upper-house elections," it said.
But the Mainichi Shimbun noted that incumbent governors won in all races they contested and that polls show voters are paying less attention to party affiliation.
"The losers were the political parties," said a Mainichi editorial.
The major parties "should face this result squarely and review the results, as if they fail to regain people's interest they are going to suffer serious defeats in the upper-house elections," it said.
Ishihara, a novelist turned politician, refused the outright endorsement of the LDP, which has ruled almost continuously since 1955.
Newspapers said voters awarded Ishihara for his success at pushing through policies despite his controversial remarks.
"It can be said that he outdistanced his rivals by demonstrating his brass and daring to speak against the central government, along with his ability to get things done," the liberal Asahi Shimbun said.
Ishihara has rammed through policies such as banning diesel engines to improve air quality. His current pet project is bringing the Summer Olympics to Tokyo in 2016.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema