Tokyo – Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will step down from his role leading the country due to declining health, he said Friday. The bombshell announcement will bring a match for the premier class in the world’s third-largest economy as it wrestles with the coronavirus pandemic, the looming threat from North Korea and an increasingly aggressive China.
“I have decided to step down as Prime Minister,” Abe told a news conference on Friday, adding that he was suffering from a recurrence of ulcerative colitis that ended his first term. .
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Hiroshige Seko, a party secretary general for the lower house of parliament, said earlier that Abe had decided to resign so that his health would not “cause problems.”
Concerns about Abe’s chronic health problems, since last summer, intensified this month when he visited a hospital in Tokyo for two weeks in a row for unspecified checks.
Abe, whose term ends in September 2021, is expected to remain on until a new party leader is elected and formally approved by parliament.
He took abrupt dismissal from his first stint in office in 2007 because of his health, which had raised concerns about his recent condition.
Abe became Japan’s longest-serving prime minister on Monday through consecutive days in office, surpassing the record of Eisaku Sato, his great-uncle, who served 2,798 days from 1964 to 1972.
But his second hospital visit on Monday fueled speculation about and political maneuvers around a post-Abe regime.
Abe has admitted he has had ulcerative colitis since he was a teenager and said the condition was checked with treatment. After his recent hospital visits were reported, top officials from Abe’s cabinet and the ruling party said Abe was overworked and needed rest.
His health concerns added to speculation that Abe’s days in office were numbered. His approval ratings are already at the lowest level due to his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the dire impact on the economy, on top of many political scandals.
Shigeru Ishiba, a 63-year-old Hawkish former defense minister and Abe’s arch-rival, is a favorite next leader in media investigations, although he is less popular within the ruling party. Former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida, Defense Minister Taro Kono, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, and Economic Revitalization Minister Yasutoshi Nishimura, who is in charge of coronavirus measures, are widely speculated in the Japanese media as potential successors to Abe .
The end of his scandal-laden first stint as prime minister was the beginning of six years of annual leadership change, remembered as an era of “revolving door” policies that lacked stability and long-term policy.
When he returned to office in 2012, Abe promised to revitalize the people and get their economy out of their deflationary doldrums with his formula “Abenomics”, which combines fiscal stimulus, monetary loss and structural reforms.
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