Abe was shot during a speech at a campaign rally ahead of Sunday’s Senate election. A 41-year-old man has been arrested. Video footage shows and hears that at least two shots were fired. On the second shot, Abe fell to the ground. He later died of his injuries in hospital.
The attack has unprecedented implications. Abe was Japan’s government leader for a total of 8 years and 267 days, making it the longest-serving prime minister the country has ever had. It is the first murder of a sitting or former prime minister in Japan since the 1930s, a period when murderousness dominated political life.
cruel act
A shelling at a campaign rally is even unique in Japanese history. “Nothing like this has ever happened,” Airo Hino, a political scientist at Waseda University, told Reuters.
Abe was Prime Minister of Japan from 2006 to 2007 and from 2012 to 2020. At the end of August 2020, he announced his resignation due to health problems. He was a Conservative politician who was a member of the Liberal Democratic Party, which also supplies current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
Kishida struggled to hold back his tears after Friday’s attack. “This attack is a brutal act that happened at election time, the bedrock of our democracy, and is completely unforgivable,” he said at a news conference when Abe’s death was unknown.
In 2006, aged 52, Abe became Japan’s youngest prime minister since World War II. A year later, he unexpectedly resigned, partly because his popularity figures had plummeted. Later, Abe said his health problems had played a role.
Four years later, he made a glorious comeback by regaining the party leadership. After that, he did not lose a single election, partly because he made clever use of the right to call by-elections. When his popularity ratings were high, or when the left-wing opposition was once again hopelessly divided, Abe felt free to call Japanese voters to the polls for a fresh mandate. He won the elections in 2018 with force majeure.
At the press conference at which he announced his resignation in 2020, Abe said that he could no longer do his job optimally due to intestinal complaints. He had suffered from chronic intestinal inflammation for years. Not long before his resignation, he had been hospitalized for the second time in a short time for examination.