Prime Minister Shinzo Abe abruptly announced Wednesday that he would resign, upsetting what was to have been an orderly end to the nationalist leader’s scandal-prone government and casting Japan’s tense political situation into further disarray.
The unpopular Abe had already been written off by Japan’s political establishment and news media, and his political future was being measured in months. The start of a new parliamentary session Monday had been expected to initiate fierce debate between the governing party and the newly powerful opposition Democratic Party, followed by probable deadlock over the Japanese military’s role in Afghanistan and then by Abe’s exit.
But his resignation timing — minutes before opposition leaders were scheduled to question him for the first time since the start of the parliamentary session Monday — stunned Japan. Scrambling to find a viable successor, Abe’s governing Liberal Democratic Party next Wednesday will choose a new party leader who, given the LDP’s control of the lower house of parliament, will automatically become prime minister.
Abe — who had described himself as a “politician who fights” — apparently had no stomach for it. As early as Monday, he had shared his wish to quit with his closest political confidant, Taro Aso, the party’s secretary general, who shares Abe’s ideological views and is now widely considered the front-runner to succeed him.
“In the current situation, it will be quite difficult to forcefully pursue policies based on the people’s support and trust,” Abe said, seeming at one point on the verge of tears and failing to bow or apologize during his news conference.
The Kyodo News Service, citing unidentified government sources, reported that Abe was to seek medical treatment at a hospital Thursday. The prime minister’s office had no comment on the report.
The timing of the resignation was all the more puzzling because Abe had refused to resign or to dissolve parliament and call a general election after his party suffered a humiliating defeat in an upper-house election over the summer. He also reshuffled his Cabinet two weeks ago in what was touted as a fresh start.
“The way he resigned was unprecedented,” said Jun Iio, a professor of government at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo. “Unfortunately, even though Abe had some successes as prime minister, he will be remembered for the way he resigned. Other prime ministers resigned after putting up a good fight and made the reasons for their resignation very clear. But the way Abe resigned suggests he lacked the qualifications to be prime minister in the first place.”
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Experts said that pressure to soon call a general election — which must be held before September 2009 — was unlikely to diminish with a change of leadership.
“A new prime minister will benefit from a bounce in the polls, but that is unlikely to be enough,” said Takeshi Sasaki, a political scientist at Gakushuin University and a former president of the University of Tokyo. “Since the last general election was in 2005, this will be the second government without the voters’ direct endorsement. So the next prime minister likely will be forced to dissolve parliament and call a general election, probably late this year or early next year.”
Abe, who became prime minister last September, gained popularity by championing the cause of a dozen Japanese abducted by North Korea in the 1970s and fanning, critics said, nationalist anger. As a lawmaker, he had long led efforts to revise school textbooks and present what critics said was a whitewashed version of Japan’s wartime history.
As prime minister, though, Abe’s Cabinet was weakened by a series of money-related scandals and gaffes that forced four of his ministers to resign. A fifth committed suicide after being caught inflating his office expenses.
But it was Abe’s mishandling of a bookkeeping problem surrounding the national pension system that contributed the most to his party’s devastating loss in the upper-house election. Although the problem had existed for many years, Abe kept quiet after learning about it early this year. After opposition politicians exposed it in the spring, Abe initially played down the issue, angering voters in a rapidly aging nation with a declining birth rate.