Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Tuesday will order his cabinet to compile a new set of economy-spurring measures, government sources said on Monday.
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TOKYO (AP) – Japan’s ruling coalition scored a stronger-than-expected victory in parliamentary elections, results showed Monday, as voters chose stability and hopes for economic revival over opposition pleas to stop the prime minister from building a more assertive military.
Mr Abe’s coalition and like-minded parties also got the two-thirds “super majority” needed to try to revise the post-war Constitution for the first time, some TV exit polls showed, although others said only that it was within their grasp.
Mr Abe had cast the election as a referendum on his “Abenomics” recipe of hyper-easy monetary policy, spending and reform.
After acknowledging that the ruling coalition won the election and retained the majority in the upper house, Abe told a press briefing during the vote counting that the result showed that his decision on sales tax hike postponement was correct and vowed to promote economy in the future.
There had been no possibility of a change of power because the coalition, headed by Mr Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party, already controls the more powerful lower house.
Half of the seats of parliament’s less powerful upper house were up for grabs.
“A vote for the LDP is a vote to destroy Article 9”, Communist Party leader Kazuo Shii said in a speech last week.
The Democratic Party, the main opposition, lost seats in the upper house, albeit a smaller number than expected.
Nonetheless, changing the 70-year-old charter has always been a dream of Japanese conservatives, who view the document as a legacy of Japan’s defeat in World War II.
“PM Abe continues a winning streak, giving him a mandate from the Japanese voters to continue LDP policies”, said Hiroki Allen, chief representative of Superfund Japan in Tokyo.
Abe declined to say how big the package might be.
Abe seized on the election results for half the seats in parliament’s upper house as a vote of confidence.
Eisuke Sakakibara, a former vice finance minister and now a professor at Aoyama Gakuin University, said he expected Abe to soon announce a supplementary budget worth $48.7 billion.
Nakano warned that ditching the pacifist constitution would mark the official start of an north-east Asian arms race, “unless one naively believes that the more Japan is remilitarised the safer the country and the world will be”.
Any legislation that mustered the two-thirds majorities needed to pass both houses would face another hurdle in the form of a national referendum.
Polling stations have opened in Japan for tens of millions of voters.
Meanwhile the LDP’s victory has also underlined weakness of opposition parties, in particular the Democratic Party, the largest opposition force.
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Japan’s voting age was lowered from 20 to 18 to encourage young people to take part in politics but their impact on the poll remained unclear.
