Voters distrust Abe Shinzo's leadership, but have few good alternatives
recorded its first case of covid-19 on January 16th, 784 people have died across the country of 126m, fewer deaths than in one day in New York City during the peak of the outbreak there. On May 14th the government lifted the state of emergency in 39 of Japan’s 47 prefectures, with more likely to be released this week. In terms of deaths relative to population, Japan ranks alongside South Korea, whose government has been widely praised for its management of the pandemic.
Mr Abe has cultivated the image of himself as a strong leader. But faced with covid-19 “he has not acted like the leader he claimed he was,” says Tobias Harris, author of “The Iconoclast”, a biography of Mr Abe to be published later this year. Instead, he has appeared hapless and out of touch, much as he did during his brief first stint as, or “one who cannot read the air”, says Jeff Kingston of Temple University in Tokyo.
The government’s economic stimulus measures have been similarly ham-fisted. Mr Abe backtracked on an initial plan to give struggling households ¥300,000 each, shifting instead to a universal ¥100,000 handout favoured by his Liberal Democratic Party’s coalition partner, Komeito. The result looked “muddled instead of decisive”, says Phillip Lipscy of the University of Toronto.
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