Dödsskjutningen av den tidigare premiärministern Shinzo Abe väntas omforma det politiska och ekonomiska landskapet i Japan. En möjlighet är att Kishida Fumio, landets nuvarande ledare, tar ett steg bort från Abes mest hökaktiga politik. Utan Abe i sin närhet kan Kishidas ”duvaktiga policy-DNA” få större utrymme, skriver The Economist. Det mest troliga scenariot är dock att Kishida fortsätter hålla sig till Abes ekonomisk-politiska inriktning – men genomföra förändringar i en långsammare takt. Abe Shinzo’s policies will live on, but may be enacted more slowly. By The Economist 10th of July 2022 Japan reeled in the hours after the shooting of Abe Shinzo on July 8th. Shocked citizens lamented the death of both a towering politician—Japan’s longest-serving post-war prime minister—and their collective sense of safety. Kishida Fumio, the country’s current leader, looked distraught as he confirmed that upper-house elections scheduled for July 10th would continue as planned, casting the killing as a challenge to democracy itself. The next day, well-wishers gathered outside Mr Abe’s home in Tokyo’s Tomigaya district to meet the hearse carrying his body back from Nara, the ancient capital where he was killed. Two days after the shooting, the sense of shock had begun to dissipate. The crowds near the former prime minister’s home had dwindled. “I’m surprised there aren’t more people—where is the queue?” wondered Nakamoto Seiji, a supporter of Mr Abe who had come to pay respects on July 10th. Just minutes away, a joyous local festival unfolded with little suggesting the recent death of the country’s most consequential modern leader: a dance troupe twirled while children took turns stroking a goat at a petting zoo.
While mourners brought flowers to the crime site, the country picked itself up and carried on. Voters gave the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) a thumping victory in the elections, as expected. Turnout is estimated to be only a shade higher than the previous upper-house vote three years ago—hardly an outpouring of sympathy for Mr Abe or a surge of newfound zeal for democracy. Mr Abe’s killing jolted a country unaccustomed to gun violence or, in recent years, to explosive politics. It also resurfaced unsettling memories of turbulent past eras: in the 1930s, militarists assassinated a series of prime ministers and senior officials in the run-up to the second world war; amid fierce debates over Japan’s post-war security policy in 1960, the leader of Japan’s left-wing Socialist party was killed. Kishi Nobusuke, Mr Abe’s grandfather and the prime minister at the time, barely survived a brutal stabbing. With plenty of opposition to Mr Abe’s efforts to beef up modern Japan’s armed forces, it seemed plausible that his killing could fall into a similar category of violence intended to change politics, with untold ramifications.
Instead, as details about the killer have trickled out, Mr Abe’s death has come to look more like a tragic but isolated murder than the opening shot of a political battle. Yamagami Tetsuya, the shooter whom police arrested at the scene, reportedly told investigators that he was not motivated by politics, but by a personal grudge against a group with which Mr Abe was loosely affiliated. (Some Japanese media reported that Mr Yamagami’s family had been embroiled with the Unification Church, a religious group whose support Mr Abe has courted in the past.) Mr Yamagami seems to have assembled his weapon at home and worked alone. The case bears more similarity to recent incidents of random violence by disturbed individuals on commuter trains than to the political turbulence of the 1930s, says Fujiwara Kiichi of the University of Tokyo. Japanese newspapers avoided using the word “assassination” in their headlines. Discussion has shifted from seeing the killing as a portent of turmoil to focusing on the striking failure of local police and security services. Nonetheless, Mr Abe’s death will reshape Japan’s political landscape. Though Mr Kishida is Japan’s official leader, the former prime minister retained outsize influence as the head of the LDP’s largest faction. His policy course remained Japan’s default—in domestic matters, but especially in foreign and security policy, where he sought to counter China’s rise by strengthening Japan’s own defences, reinforcing its alliance with America and building ties with other regional powers.
Mr Abe used his bully pulpit to push Mr Kishida further in that direction. His absence leaves a gaping hole: his faction has no clear successor, and no one else in the LDP’s conservative wing has the stature to pick up his mantle. That, along with the LDP’s victory in the upper-house elections, leaves Mr Kishida with ample room to operate. The question is “whether the incident will come to be seen as a turning point in Japanese political history” or whether it ends up “just having been an incident”, says Gerald Curtis of Columbia University. One possible outcome is an acceleration of the course Mr Abe set. Conservatives are sure to use his death to highlight the need for the kind of security policies he championed. Mr Kishida may countenance or even embrace such cries, rallying for more spending on a beefier army and perhaps even for revising Japan’s pacifist constitution, Mr Abe’s lifelong goal. Exit polls suggest that pro-revision parties will easily clear the two-thirds threshold necessary to make amendments. Though such changes would still need to pass a national referendum, Mr Abe’s death could prove a “tailwind”, reckons Richard Samuels of MIT.
Another possibility is that Mr Kishida reverses direction on some of Mr Abe’s most hawkish policies. He belongs to a traditionally moderate faction of the party. Without Mr Abe around, “his dovish policy DNA” may come out, says Toshikawa Takao, the editor of Insideline, a political newsletter. The likeliest scenario is that Mr Kishida sticks to Mr Abe’s direction, but moves at a slower pace. When it comes to Japan’s strategic choices, “‘stay the course’ is the only option the Kishida administration can have, and they are well aware of this,” argues Funabashi Yoichi of the Asia-Pacific Initiative, a think-tank in Tokyo. Additionally, the “centre of gravity of public opinion has shifted” toward support for a stronger, more muscular Japan, says Mr Samuels. At the same time, Mr Abe’s death will upset the power balance inside the LDP, unleashing factional infighting that slows change. No one in the party, including Mr Kishida, can match Mr Abe’s network of relationships with world leaders. (India declared a national day of mourning for Mr Abe; America’s White House lowered its flag to half staff in his honour; Australia lit the Sydney opera house with an image of the Japanese flag.) And Mr Kishida has “no real history of being very decisive about anything,” says Mr Curtis. The result may be a less dynamic, more cautious Japan. That, laments Taniguchi Tomohiko, a foreign-policy adviser and speechwriter for Mr Abe, “is a luxury Japan does not have.” © 2022 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.