TOKYO – Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will resign over ill health, the country’s national broadcaster said Friday, just four days after breaking the record for the longest consecutive run as leader in Japanese history.
Mr Abe, 65, had been prime minister for almost eight years, a major achievement in a country accustomed to high turnover in the top job. During his tenure, he oversaw Japan’s recovery from a devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, restoring a semblance of economic health and cracking favor to an unpredictable American president, Donald J. Trump.
Yet despite his long tenure – his second stint as prime minister after taking office in 2006-7 – Mr Abe failed to achieve some of his signature goals. He could not install the pacifist constitution by American occupiers after the war, or secure the return of conflicting islands by both Japan and Russia, so the two countries could sign a peace treaty to officially end World War II.
The Japanese news media have been speculating for weeks about Mr Abe’s health, especially after he made public appearances significantly as a new wave of coronavirus infections broke out in clusters across the country. When Mr. Abe visited a hospital twice during the week, the rumor mill went into overdrive.
Earlier on Friday, Mr Abe’s cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga had reassured reporters that Mr Abe had intended to remain in office. “The prime minister himself has said he wants to work hard again from now on, and I see him every day,” Mr Suga said in a newsletter, saying the prime minister’s health “remains unchanged.”
Mr Abe, the grandson of a prime minister accused of war crimes and the son of a former foreign minister, began his first year-long term as prime minister in 2006. When he resigned in 2007 under a cloud of scandal, he he the debilitating effects of ulcerative colitis, an intestinal disease.
During his second term in office, which began in late 2012, Mr Abe survived a number of influential peddling scandals and ran several elections. In 2015, he pushed through controversial security legislation that allowed Japanese troops to participate in overseas combat missions alongside allied troops, as part of ‘collective self-defense’.
His political power reached a peak in 2017, when his party won a landslide victory that gave it, along with its coalition partners, two-thirds of the seats in parliament. That was the supremacy needed to push through a constitutional revision, but Mr Abe never made that dream come true, with public opposition to such a change remaining high.
Mr Abe, who was in office when Tokyo won his bid to host the 2020 Summer Olympics, resigned before he could chair the Games, which were postponed to 2021 due to the pandemic.
By the time of his dismissal, Mr. Abe was an enormously unpopular leader whose rejection ratings at their highest level had risen since he began his second term.
The public was dissatisfied with its administration’s coronavirus treatment, in particular its effects on the economy, thereby erasing what it could achieve under its economic platform, known as “Abenomics.”
Under that program, Mr. Abe had managed a triangular plan of monetary relief, fiscal stimulus and business reform. Most of their promises of business reform – including efforts to empower women, reduce the impact of nepotism, and change changing work cultures – have remained unfulfilled.
If he had remained in office, his term would expire in September 2021.
