Japan’s prime minister is more of a survivor than a reformer

JAPANESE prime ministers used to come and go in the blink of an eye, but Shinzo Abe has been in office for longer than the previous five combined. This week he easily won a third consecutive term as head of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (see ). Given the LDP’s landslide victory in last year’s parliamentary election, Mr Abe is now secure in office until 2021.If he completes his new term, he would be the longest-serving prime minister since the job was created, in 1885. Under him, the LDP has convincingly won three elections for the lower house and two for the upper house. With his coalition partners, he commands more than two-thirds of the Diet. Perhaps most impressively, he has quelled the factionalism that used to plague his party. Despite various scandals, he is firmly in charge, as he showed by engineering a change in party rules to allow himself to have a third term. Now that he has been re-elected, Mr Abe should use this unrivalled power to complete his economic programme. The danger is that he will get bogged down in changing Japan’s pacifist constitution instead.