Shinzo Abe
Shinzo Abe was the longest-serving prime minister in Japanese history, and he got there by failing completely the first time. He was the grandson of a prime minister who had been imprisoned as a suspected war criminal and released without charge, and he inherited that man's project: to end the postwar settlement under which Japan apologised, disarmed and deferred. His first term, from 2006, lasted twelve months and collapsed in a mess of ministerial scandals, a lost election and a chronic illness he resigned to treat. He came back in 2012 with a new drug, a disciplined party and a programme with a name. The economics were three arrows: monetary expansion, fiscal spending and structural reform. The first was fired with extraordinary force - the central bank bought government bonds and then equities on a scale no major economy had attempted, drove the currency down by a third and ended fifteen years of deflation - and the third barely at all, beyond a corporate governance code and a modest increase in women and foreigners in the workforce. Growth was mediocre and employment was excellent, which was enough to win six national elections. The security policy was the real project. In 2014 his cabinet reinterpreted the constitution's renunciation of war to permit Japanese forces to fight in defence of an ally, a change previous governments had said would require amending the text, and the legislation passed the following year through parliamentary uproar and the largest street protests in decades. He raised defence spending, created a national security council, and articulated a conception of a free and open Indo-Pacific that was adopted almost verbatim by Washington, Canberra and Delhi, and which revived the four-country grouping that is now the framework for containing China. He never got the constitutional amendment itself. He resigned in 2020 when the illness returned, and in 2022 was shot dead at a campaign stop by a man whose family had been ruined by a religious organisation with long-standing ties to the party, a killing that brought down a cabinet by what it revealed rather than by whom it removed.
- Lived: 1954 CE – 2022 CE
- Nationality: Japanese
- Roles: head_of_government
