Source: Zhonggong Net - Workers Daily
Original title: Kishida Fumio won the "big test", whether the Japanese Constitutional Revision Association will take advantage of the situation to accelerate
Zhao Xiaozhan
On October 31, the elections for the 49th House of Representatives of the Diet of Japan ended at 8 p.m. local time and began counting.
As of 00:00 on November 1, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and the Komeito Party had won a "stable majority" of the total 465 seats, with the LDP alone surpassing the 233 seats of the House of Representatives, which allowed Kishida Fumio to avoid the embarrassment of becoming Japan's "shortest-serving prime minister."
On the other hand, the Liberal Democratic Party has also temporarily spent more than a year, because former Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga is deeply trapped in the "quagmire" of the epidemic and economic deterioration, and the support rate has been declining.
However, in the eyes of analysts, although Kishida Fumio won the "big test", his road ahead was not smooth. Whether or not he can fulfill his commitment to strengthen the fight against the epidemic and restart the economy will be a decisive factor for Kishida Fumio to come to power in the future.
At the same time, whether the pace of constitutional revision in Japanese society will accelerate has become a focus of attention of the international community.
On October 14, just 10 days after Kishida took office as Japan's 100th prime minister, he announced the dissolution of the House of Representatives, the implementation of re-elections, and the decision to vote in 17 days, both of which set the shortest record since the end of the war.
The reason is that Japanese media analysis believes that the term of office of the 48th House of Representatives was originally expired on October 21 this year, but the Liberal Democratic Party conducted a house election situation survey around August, and the results were shocking.
Survey data shows that because former Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has not performed well in the past year in power, in the October House of Representatives election, "the Liberal Democratic Party may lose 60 seats±10 seats" and "the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and the Komeito Party will win less than half of the seats."
Japanese media said that it was this investigation that made Suga decide to resign, and the Liberal Democratic Party also held an early presidential election at the end of September, trying to win public support by changing the "election façade (president)" in order to maintain its ruling position.
This also makes the election of the House of Representatives of the Japanese Diet a "life-and-death battle" for Kishida Fumio: if he fails, he will become Japan's shortest-serving prime minister.
In 2014 and 2017, former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe won the House of Representatives election in this way.
In the eyes of the outside world, this is a general election held after the end of the first parliamentary term after 12 years under the current Japanese constitution, and it is also the first general election after Japan's change of year number "Reiwa". From Suga's waiver of re-election as LDP president to the election of the LDP president and the election of the Kishida cabinet, Japan's turbulent political situation over the past two months may come to an end with the arrival of the House of Representatives elections.
Earlier, Kishida Fumio had vowed to present the Japanese people with a "reborn" Liberal Democratic Party. But media observations have found that despite the emergence of some new faces, their names are familiar, many of them from Japanese political families.
Xinhua reported that the election continued the characteristics of Japan's "hereditary politics". Japanese politics is usually dominated by political families, and it is a major feature of Japanese politics to train hereditary parliamentarians who inherit their father's business and then produce prime ministers from them.
According to statistics, 104 of the 336 LDP candidates have political backgrounds; even among the opposition Cadets, this proportion has reached 12.1%.
For now, the Liberal Democratic Party and Kishida Fumio also face a challenge: the re-election of the Senate next summer. In Japanese politics, though, gaining control of the House of Representatives is crucial. However, the defeat in the house election will recur the phenomenon of "distorting the Diet" and will also lead to a new period of instability in Japanese politics.
In the eyes of the international community, after the results of the Japanese House of Representatives election come out, it is more worth paying attention to whether the pace of Constitutional Amendment in Japan will accelerate.
At present, in Japan, the "constitutional revision forces" advocating the revision of Japan's post-World War II pacifist constitution, mainly political parties such as the Liberal Democratic Party, the Komeito Party, and the Japan Restoration Association, need more than two-thirds (310) seats to initiate a constitutional amendment motion in the House of Representatives.
Also as of 00:00 on November 1, the Japan Restoration Association has become the biggest winner and dark horse of the election, having won 38 seats and added 18 seats.
Previously, October 17-18 was the day of the autumn festival at the Yasukuni Shrine in Japan. Although he did not visit the shrine, Kishida Fumio presented a wooden plaque with the words "Prime Minister Kishida Fumio" on the 17th, and a tribute known as "Majima".
Suga visited the Yasukuni Shrine on the same day, just 13 days after he stepped down as prime minister. On the night of the dissolution of Japan's House of Representatives, Mr. Abe posted on social media a photo of him visiting the Yasukuni Shrine that day.
In recent years, some Japanese politicians have repeatedly "reversed the car" on historical issues, which has not only caused great harm to Japan's domestic political ecology, but also damaged Japan's relations with neighboring countries.
Editor-in-charge: Xiao Tian