Friend of India, Shinzo Abe to be Japan’s youngest PM

TOKYO, SEPTEMBER 20 Some people in the Indian community in Tokyo like to describe Shinzo Abe, who won a landslide victory as the head of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party today, as Japan’s “Rajiv Gandhi”. Why? Because he will become Japan’s youngest Prime Minister on September 26, when Diet, the country’s parliament, officially elects him to the top post.

With LDP enjoying a huge majority in Diet, Abe’s election as successor to Junichiro Koizumi, the outgoing prime minister, is now a mere formality. Abe, who celebrates his 52nd birthday tomorrow, will also be his country’s first premier born after World War II, a psychologically important line of separation in modern Japanese history.

Like Rajiv Gandhi, Abe is both young and strikingly good-looking. But there is a more important similarity: lineage. His grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was the prime minister of Japan in 1950s. His great-uncle, Eisaku Sato, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974, was also Japan’s prime minister for eight years (1964-72). His father, Shintaro Abe, was foreign minister in the 1980s. Known as “the prince” of Japanese politics, he was widely tipped to become prime minister, but liver cancer killed him in 1991.

No wonder, Japanese commentators refer to Abe’s inheritance of “political DNA” from his family. Abe, who, as chief cabinet secretary, occupied no. 2 position in Koizumi’s government, won 464 out of the total 703 votes in the LDP presidential election today. Foreign Minister Taro Aso, 66, and finance minister Sadakazu Tanigaki, 61, were left way behind — with 136 and 102 votes respectively.

Abe belongs to the LDP faction led by former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori. He was also backed by Koizumi, who won for his party a sweeping victory in last year’s parliamentary elections by seeking people’s support for a contentious reform initiative to privatize postal services. (Post office savings in Japan are $3 trillion or nearly Rs 14, 000,000 crore).

Last week, NHK, which is Japan`s main TV channel, got all the three LDP presidential candidates for a live debate in a popular programme called “Sunday Project”. Abe came across as a natural winner — cool, composed, unfazed by tough questions, and persuasively articulate. Although he got 66% of the votes in the party election, popular backing for Abe, as revealed in opinion polls, has touched 80%. This support is less on account of his political pedigree and more due to his firm nationalist platform.

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Friend of India, Shinzo Abe to be Japan’s youngest PM

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