08:43
Tieng Anh Vui
AT THE heart of the economic programme of Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, is a series of supply-side reforms to lift the economy’s growth rate. Yet the cabinet he formed in December 2012, not long before embarking on “Abenomics”, was noteworthy not for reforming heavyweights but for a line-up of right-wingers chiefly preoccupied with revising the record of Japan’s wartime atrocities. On September 3rd, in his first cabinet reshuffle since taking office, Mr Abe improved matters somewhat by replacing 12 members of his 18-strong team.
Mounting pressure for the revamp had emerged from the ranks of Mr Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which contains dozens of veteran politicians never entrusted with a ministerial post. Yet the overhaul also comes at a moment of sagging confidence in Abenomics at home and abroad. The government was shocked by recent news that real GDP shrank by 6.8% at an annualised rate in the second quarter, following a rise in the rate of the consumption tax in April. A string of grim data, showing a continuing slump in household income and consumption, sluggish exports and weak industrial production, has further dampened hopes of a vigorous rebound in the coming months.
Mr Abe was expected to retain the main figures of a government which has proven unusually cohesive and stable. The chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, will stay, as will the finance minister, Taro Aso, the economy minister, Akira Amari, and the foreign minister, Fumio Kishida. Mr Abe more than doubled the number of women in the cabinet to a total of five, as part of his promise to bolster female participation in politics and in business.
The growing sense of crisis around Abenomics seems to have prompted a particularly bold appointment. The LDP’s most outspoken economic moderniser, Yasuhisa Shiozaki, was named as the health, labour and welfare minister. Alongside labour unions, the ministry has so far stymied efforts to make it easier to fire full-time workers. With Mr Shiozaki at the helm, says Heizo Takenaka, an adviser to Mr Abe, meaningful labour reform can now be achieved. The hope is that companies will more readily take on permanent employees rather than irregular, lower-paid workers. Foreign investors also hailed the appointment, as they hope that Mr Shiozaki will shake up Japan’s vast pension fund, boosting the stockmarket.
The reshuffle, and especially the appointment of women, may help lift Mr Abe’s approval ratings, which have recently tumbled. Yet there are risks, chiefly of a return to the habitual gaffes and missteps of former cabinets. Resistance to the government’s economic reforms is gathering inside the LDP ahead of a nationwide series of local elections next spring.
Mr Abe failed in a clumsy attempt to bully his chief political rival, Shigeru Ishiba, the LDP’s secretary-general, into accepting a new ministerial post to oversee the passage of highly unpopular security legislation to allow Japan to come to the defence of its allies if under attack. Mr Ishiba, who has emerged as a leader of anti-Abe sentiment, refused the job. But Mr Abe eventually prevailed on him to accept a newly created post to revive regional economies. It is a sign that Mr Ishiba has largely given up on a serious run at the LDP presidency next year, says Gerald Curtis of Columbia University.
Contrary to the hopes of the LDP’s moderates and of economic reformers, the cabinet’s right-wing slant looks set to persist. The education minister, Hakubun Shimomura, will stay—earlier this year he angered South Korea by questioning the Japanese government’s commitment to former official apologies for the imperial army’s wartime corralling of Asian women into brothels. Mr Abe’s new internal affairs and communications minister, Sanae Takaichi, is another revisionist. But in a gesture to China, Mr Abe moved Sadakazu Tanigaki, a moderate politician with ties to the government in Beijing, from justice minister to the post of secretary-general of the LDP, replacing the hawkish Mr Ishiba.
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