In the same handful of hours, a man assassinated a conservative-nationalist leader in a Pacific island country, a group of men toppled a conservative-nationalist prime minister in an Atlantic island country from party leadership, and a mob of men invaded the presidential palace to kick out a national-populist president in an Indian island country.
Three islands, three oceans and three shipwrecks. In Britainthe prime minister was overthrown from the party leadership by his own comrades and was forced to leave office, while in Japan a former prime minister fell dejected by bullets fired at him by a lunatic. Shortly after, a massive protest invaded the presidential palace in Sri Lankaputting to flight the president repudiated by the economic disaster.
What they have in common Boris Johnson, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa Y Shinzo Abe is that all three represented nationalist turns in their center-right parties. Everything else sets them apart. The English and the Sinhalese are responsible for their shipwrecks, but the former Japanese premier would have been the victim of the mental or emotional imbalance of his victimizer.
In Sri Lanka, militarist national-populism had eliminated the Tamil guerrillas who had spent decades fighting for the secession of the Jafna peninsula. The president who fled in terror when the mob invaded the palace had been defense minister to the previous president, his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa.
But the terrifying ineptitude in the management of the economy, complicated by the pandemic, the debt contracted with China and the food blockade due to the war in ukraine plunged the country that floats south of India into famine. Even more dramatic were the images of the assassination. Shot at a rally, the man who pushed for the re-militarization of Japan has died. The turnaround had begun with his predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, the first Japanese ruler to visit Yasukuni since the end of World War II.
In this Shinto temple, the souls of combatants killed on battlefields since 1869 are venerated, thousands of whom were war criminals. In Shintoism, the crime remains in the human being, not in the “kami” (soul), which remains in a state of purity. But for the nations occupied by japan in the first half of the 20th century, visiting that temple is the aggressive sign of the ultra-nationalism that invaded Korea, the Philippines, Burma and Chinese Manchuria, which it called Manchukuo.
In those territories he committed brutal crimes. That is why when a prime minister visits Yasukuni, there are diplomatic complaints and protests outside the Japanese embassies in Seoul, Beijing, Manila and Yangon. Koizumi and Abe were not ultranationalists. They visited Yasukuni because pushed to rearm Japan in the face of a hostile environment. Abe promoted the constitutional reform so that the country can equip itself with armed forces that guarantee security in the face of disputes with China over the Senkaku Islands; with Russia over the Kuril archipelago and with the North Korean regime over missile tests launched over Japanese waters.
The murder of Shinzo Abe It is, together with another assassination that was perpetrated in 1960 and together with the attack of the Aun Shinrikýo sect in 1995, the most shocking violent act that has occurred in Japan. There were others. In 1990, a former Minister of Labor was stabbed to death. That same year, the then mayor of Nagasaki survived an attack, a city in which another mayor was assassinated decades later. But none of those crimes hit like that of Inejiro Asanuma, president of the Socialist Party, stabbed on camera in a television studio during a debate broadcast in 1960.
Between that assassination and that of Shinzo Abe, the attack by the apocalyptic sect Aum Shinrikýo took place, launching sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in March 1995. The number of attacks gives the impression of a violent society, however, criminal violence is so sporadic and statistically insignificant in Japan, that in political acts there are few security measures. Attacks with firearms are very rare and are usually carried out by the Yakuza, because such weapons are prohibited and the powerful mafia obtains them through smuggling.
Although it involved a change in Japanese policy, Shinzo Abe he had the manners of a conventional politician. Boris Johnson, on the other hand, was a disruptive leader who, in the circumspect Conservative Party, was just plain outlandish.
The Japanese were shaken by a violent death in a country with low crime, while the British were surprised by a political collapse for reasons that are unusual in that political scenario.
His life was always as chaotic as his hair. But his disorders and messes did not prevent him from rising in the party structure. The journey to the summits is full of lies and falsehoods. For falsifying statements in the articles he wrote as a journalist for The Times, he was fired from that newspaper. Years later was displaced in the party leadership for lying about an extramarital affair. And he lied again by spreading certainties that he did not have about the supposed immediate benefits of Brexit.
He seemed immune to the scandals his lies produced. With that background, he became Mayor of London, a position he held with generally mediocre results, but with remarkable achievement: the stupendous performance of the 2012 Olympics.
Her management of the pandemic was also chaotic, but she was saved by the effective vaccination plan. When he charged, first against David Cameron, the prime minister who called the referendum in which the Brexit option was imposed, and then against Theresa May, the premier who attempted an orderly and responsible exit from the EU, his little attachment to ethics and truth.
So it should have come as no surprise that he lied about his misconduct as prime minister when he breached social distancing rules by partying at 10 Downing Street. The fault was serious in itself, but Boris Johnson he aggravated it even more by lying publicly denying those clandestine meetings. She tried to ignore the clear message of a partisan vote like the ones that, at the time, had made Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May resign. But the party told her enough again and a wave of resignations in her cabinet made her realize the shipwreck.
