who was Shinzo Abe, iconic former prime minister killed at campaign rally?

He had broken records for longevity at the head of Japan. Nearly two years after stepping down as Prime Minister for health reasons, Shinzo Abe has died at the age of 67, Nara Hospital announced on Friday July 7. He had been admitted there a few hours earlier in critical condition, after being shot in the middle of the street during a campaign rally for the senatorial elections. A suspect was arrested by the police.

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Grandson of the Prime Minister, the conservative has had a profound impact on Japanese political life. Shinzo Abe was 52 when he first became head of government in 2006. He was then the youngest post-war executive in his country. But it was during his second term in power, from 2012 to 2020, that he stood out with a bold economic recovery policy. Nicknamed “Abenomics”it combined monetary easing, massive fiscal stimulus and structural reforms.

This policy has enabled the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party to afford several successes, such as a significant increase in the activity rate of women and seniors, as well as greater recourse to immigration in the face of the labor shortage. -work. But, due to the lack of sufficient structural reforms, Abenomics has only generated partial successes.

This heir to a large family of conservative politicians also carried out intense diplomatic activity. Shinzo Abe had thus always taken care to maintain his relations with the United States, historical allies of Japan. He had thus managed to establish close ties with Donald Trump, with whom he shared a passion for golf.

At the same time, the curator had tried not to offend Russian President Vladimir Putin. His hope of settling the dispute over the Southern Kuril Islands, annexed by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II and never returned to Japan, however, proved futile. He had also tried to strengthen Japan’s presence on the international scene, for example by taking on the role of mediator between Iran and the United States, by promoting multilateralism and by multiplying free trade agreements.

Having built part of his reputation on his firmness vis-à-vis North Korea, Shinzo Abe had on the other hand refused to apologize for the abuses committed by the Japanese army in China and on the Korean peninsula during the first half of the 20th century. In 2013, his visit to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, a hotbed of Japanese nationalism, had thus outraged Beijing, Seoul and Washington, according to the Washington Post.

Shinzo Abe held the record for longevity as prime minister. To last in power, he had largely taken advantage of the absence of a serious rival within his political formation. He had also benefited from the weakness of the opposition, which has still not recovered from its disastrous stay in power between 2009 and 2012.

Some laws passed during his tenure, such as the renforcement of the protection of State secrets and the hardening of the fight against terrorism, had, however, brought him the disapproval of the Japanese. The expanded missions of the Japan Self-Defense Forces had also led to large demonstrations, usually rare in the country, in 2015, recalls RFI. Another failure: he never succeeded in revising the pacifist Japanese Constitution of 1947, written by the American occupiers and never amended since.

Shinzo Abe’s image had been tarnished by corruption charges in early 2018. The Prime Minister and some of his relatives had been implicated in several cases, including a real estate scandal, reports The cross. The Conservative had apologized to Parliament, but remained in power.

In the summer of 2020, Shinzo Abe’s popularity rating plummeted due to his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. He had long clung to the hope of maintaining the Tokyo Olympics, which was to be the high point of his last term. These finally took place a year later, behind closed doors.

At the end of August 2020, he announced his resignation, explaining that he suffered from a chronic inflammatory bowel disease, ulcerative colitis. This pathology was already one of the reasons for the abrupt end of his first stint in power, in 2007.

Shinzo Abe had nevertheless remained very active in Japanese political life, underlines the New York Times. According to the American daily, he had largely influenced the choice of his two successors. He was killed while giving a speech in support of the Liberal Democratic Party, three days before the senatorial elections in Japan.