(Pamela Cosel, Headline USA) Voter turnout in Japan increased last week just two days after former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated at a campaign event, helping to give the Liberal Democratic Party a decisive majority, winning 87 seats.
Only 70 seats were needed to obtain a parliamentary supermajority for the party.
Abe was the longest serving prime minister in Japan since World War II, and was the youngest when elected at age 52 in 2006.
This gain will allow the LDP to make a change to the country’s pacifist Constitution that renounces war, which was one of Abe’s longtime goals. Such a change would allow Japan to once again become a military power, reported Townhall.
However, current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has other issues to address that directly affect the country’s population: prices, daily life, medical services, wages and childcare.
“I have the responsibility to take over the ideas of former Prime Minister Abe,” Kishida told his supporters on Saturday.
“Constitutional revision is a kind of luxury good,” said a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, Tobias Harris, reported Townhall.
Japan’s political leaders emphasized the “importance of free speech and defending democracy against acts of violence.”
Prior to the election, major media outlets were criticized for their incorrect portrayal of Abe after his death, calling him a “divisive arch-conservative” in a tweet by NPR, which has since been deleted, wrote the Daily Wire. Yet NPR in the past erroneously called Fidel Castro a “prominent international figure” and Yasser Arafat “a freedom fighter.”
In a blunder by the Today Show, the South Korean flags were shown instead of Japan flags when talking about Abe’s killing.
On Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will be in Tokyo to offer condolences over the death of Abe. He is currently in Asia for other meetings.
