Like politics in India, Japanese politics has suddenly entered into a difficult phase with the resignation of Shinzo Abe as prime minister on the third day of the 62-day extraordinary Diet session. After less than a year in office, the embattled Abe announced that he was stepping down, taking responsibility for the confusion in national politics following the ruling coalition’s loss in the House of Councillors election on July 29 and the stalemate over Japan’s anti-terrorism mission in the Indian Ocean. It was surprising, because it came just two weeks after Abe had enacted a major Cabinet reshuffle to resuscitate the flagging image of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The way is now open for the party to choose a new leader, who will almost certainly become the prime minister because of LDP’s comfortable majority in the House of Representatives.

Abe was staking his job on the extension of the Indian Ocean mission, which he had described as the centrepiece of his diplomacy. A special law that enables this mission will expire on November 1 and the Opposition has vowed to block its extension. Last Sunday, at the annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Sydney, Abe had said that he would not cling to office if he failed to keep the mission alive. What probably provoked him to take the decision to quit was the snub that he had received from Ichiro Ozawa, leader of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), when the latter maintained that the extension of the refuelling mission in support of coalition forces in Afghanistan ran counter to the Constitution and was unacceptable.

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