Election campaigning in Japan began in earnest yesterday with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seeking to repel an upstart new party that has pledged to rid the government of cronyism in a challenge to Abe’s near-five year hold on power.
The Oct. 22 lower-house election pits Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)-led coalition against the less than one-month-old Party of Hope headed by popular Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike, a former LDP lawmaker often floated as a possible first female prime minister.
In his first campaign speech, Abe attacked the opposition for using populist slogans.
Photo: EPA
“What creates our future is not a boom or slogan. It is policy that creates our future,” Abe said in Fukushima. “We just cannot afford to lose.”
The LDP-led coalition is defending a two-thirds “super majority” in parliament’s lower house, so losing its simple majority would be a major upset.
Abe’s LDP had 288 seats in the lower house before it was dissolved for the election, while its junior partner, the Komeito, had 35. The total number of seats has been cut to 465 from 475.
Opinion polls show the LDP in the lead and some analysts think Abe could still pull off another landslide victory.
“We have a surplus of things in this country, but what we don’t have is hope for the future,” Koike said, kicking off her campaign outside one of Tokyo’s major train stations.
Koike has repeatedly said she will not run for a seat, which would make her eligible to be prime minister, and has declined to say who her party would support for the post, leaving the door open to a variety of possible tie-ups including with Abe’s LDP.
“The Party of Hope looks a lot like the LDP, but doesn’t have the same problem with vested interests,” said Koji Sasaya, 82, a US resident and longtime LDP supporter who traveled to Japan to vote in the election for Koike’s new party.
Others outside the station were less convinced by Koike’s talk of cleaner politics, while trusting Abe to safeguard national security.
“I doubt she can deliver politics free from vested interests,” said Minori Hiramatsu, a 28-year-old mother of one who was on her way to a job interview. “Abe has problems domestically, but he is the best person to protect us from North Korean threats.”
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