(MaceNews) – Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, known for his reflationary economic policy and nationalistic views, was shot from behind by a man in his 40s in the western prefecture of Nara on Friday, public broadcaster NHK and other news media reported.
Ahead of Sunday’s upper house elections, in which the ruling coalition is set to maintain a majority, Abe was giving a public speech on the street near a train station, when two gun shots were heard at about 1130 JST (2230 EDT Thursday), NHK said. Witnesses told the television network that Abe collapsed after the second shot and was seen bleeding.
Abe appears to be in a state of cardiac arrest, NHK said.
Police arrested a man identified as Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, who used what appears to be a homemade shotgun to attack the blueblood politician, NHK said, showing TV footage of Abe’s body guards tackling the shooter just after the second shot.
There was no report on the motive of the attack. While in office, Abe gained support from conservative voters but also received criticism from ultra-rightists who thought Abe’s diplomatic stance on China and South Korea, which have been critical about Japan’s wartime atrocities in Asia, was not hardline enough.
Abe’s ambition was to rewrite Japan’s post-war Pacifist constitution but he gained popularity during his 2012 election campaign by promoting the idea of reflating the economy with massive cash injections into the financial system and boosting exporter profits, and thus overall stock market sentiment, by guiding the yen weaker.
Abe took office in December 2012 after bringing his conservative Liberal Democratic Party back to power in a landslide lower house election win with campaign promises to revitalize the economy and boost national confidence. He resigned in September 2020 in light of recurring ulcerative colitis, which had ended his first, brief premiership in 2007, but continues to influence LDP policymaking as the head of the largest faction in the ruling party.
Abe used the Bank of Japan and Governor Haruhiko Kuroda, whom he installed, to keep the yen weak and deliver on some of his 2012 campaign promises to “correct the high yen” and “beat deflation.” Super-low borrowing costs are also helping the government keep issuing bonds to finance a series of economic stimulus packages.
The reflationary experiment by Abe might have benefited people with extra money to invest in stock markets or big businesses receiving tax cuts, but the trickle-down effect never came through and the middle class disappeared (Abe denied he had formally aimed at the trickle-down effect and called his approach bottom-up).
Massive cash injections into the financial system by the Bank of Japan, which was launched in April 2013, initially lifted inflation toward the bank’s 2% inflation target but the long-lasting drag from the sales tax hike to 8% from 5% in April 2014 and the dampening impact of a crude oil price plunge in 2015 depressed prices again.
Abe was criticized by opposition party lawmakers and liberal-minded voters that his “us against them” remarks with a nationalistic political view divided the nation, and that he has failed to stop hate speech.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who took office last year, has been calling for a “shift from policies based on neoliberalism that have lasted since the Koizumi administration,” referring to market-oriented reforms that have been criticized for creating income inequality.
Junichiro Koizumi, an LDP prime minister from 2001 to 2006, pushed for the privatization of the postal savings system through which the government was channeling massive funds to finance public projects outside of the official budget.
Under the slogan “No reform, no growth,” Koizumi also sought to boost Japan’s banking system by forcing lenders to slash non-performing loans.
Koizumi brought Heizo Takenaka, an economics professor, into his cabinet to accelerate his reform agenda. The two men were later blamed by critics of neoliberalism for opening up the labor market to staffing agencies without providing social security networks for a growing number of underpaid contract workers, many of them women and young people.
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