Unlike other former prime ministers who faded away after stepping down, Abe was at the forefront of Japanese politics.
He was a backbencher when he was killed a year ago today, after stepping down as prime minister in 2020 due to ill health. Yet such was his influence that the 100-member faction he led in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party is still rudderless. The LDP faction led by current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is just 46-strong.
“Abe, his entourage and his faction, symbolised the hard line of the LDP,” Dr Toru Yoshida of Kyoto’s Doshisha University told The Straits Times. “Kishida’s leadership was thanks to Abe, with whom he could make a deal.” Mr Abe was gunned down in Nara during a campaign rally by a 42-year-old man who said he bore a grudge against the politician for his purported links with the Unification Church, which the killer blamed for brainwashing and bankrupting his mother. The assassination exposed shady links between LDP politics and religion in Japan, sinking support for Mr Kishida.
Sophia University political scientist Koichi Nakano, describing Mr Abe as a “strongman”, told ST: “This shows the difficulty of leadership succession with a strongman leader. How to find a successor, how to restabilise the regime, becomes very, very difficult.”
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