Scandals in cascade, a food-safety crisis, report of the Tokyo olympic Games, requirement to renounce reforms because of popular protests : everything goes wrong for the Prime minister of japan Shinzo Abe.
“there is clearly a problem of wear and tear, he is there for too long, nine years in total if we count his first term missed in 2007-2008,” says to The Point Robert Dujarric, director of the research Institute of asian at Temple university in Tokyo. “Truth be told, the affairs that affect them are rather seedy, these are not scandals major personal enrichment. But he did not understand that the world has changed, that politics today should be more clean, that what was accepted 30 years ago is no longer. “
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Abe is accused of having favoured friends on various occasions. Unless the minions have themselves a privileged knowledge of the “all-powerful Abe” to make him happy, a process called sontaku, one of the words most heard in recent years. “It’s repetitive, and it makes a very bad impression “, said Robert Dujarric. The arrests on 18 June of the mp and ex-minister of Justice, Katsuyuki Kawai and his wife Anri, senator, is the latest case as of the date of a serial that begins to be long.
The couple is accused of having lavished of local elected officials and other people for that Anri is elected. “The investigative unit special prosecution office of Tokyo like this kind of move that proves his independence,” says an ex-inspector of the section of investigation known to have also stopped Carlos Ghosn at the end of 2018. The press spring of the archives the photos where one sees Anri perched on the roof of a truck campaign, hand in hand to the Prime minister calling on them to vote for it.
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The fall is brutal in the polls : the rating of the Abe administration is now around 36 %, according to the survey of agency Kyodo conducted after the arrest of the Kawai. Abe, the heir to a lineage of politicians, also pays for the effects of ” corona “. “The crisis of the coronavirus has not been catastrophic on the health plan, but this is not necessarily due to the decisions taken. The economic consequences, however, are massive, ” said Mr. Dujarric.
The criticism is more and more bright, including in the liberal democratic Party of Abe, where he seeks a successor, his term as president expires in September 2021.
Dodge
If he still has regiments of nationalists to support the protesters, who have already prevented to prolong the career of a prosecutor’s ally, call now to resign, in which writers such as Keiichiro Hirano, and Masahiko Shimada, who see him as a danger to democracy. The political scientist Koichi Nakano says that “this government is characterized by its lack of transparency” and that this is seen more and more. If Abe has repeatedly shown that he had the resource and not bad luck, this time it appears stuck. In addition, it cannot use the “tool of diplomacy” that he has often handled to bounce back, notes the analyst Tobias Harris.
For the moment, Abe is doing with flips and phrases pretenses that it reads out in Parliament or at a press conference in response to questions previously received. A close is made pin, a minister is forced to resign ? “I feel fully my responsibility, I pray the citizens of apologize “, and then nothing. He sweeps the critics and says the after-sales service, to his faithful servant, the secretary general of the government, Yoshihide Suga, very good for rembarrer journalists pugnaces and grant the favors of the less experienced. Remains that Abe is still obsessed with the mission he himself has set out to reform the pacifist Constitution, never altered since 1947. “It is hard to see how it could get there “, slice Robert Dujarric. As for the olympic games in Tokyo, he wants to see before leaving, there is no guarantee for the time that they will be good next year.
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