Shinzo Abe assassination: Japanese voters head to polls in grief and disbelief

Voters pause for a moment of silence to commemorate former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe before the start of an election street campaign in Tokyo, Japan. Photograph: Christopher Jue/EPAMany Japanese voters will go to the polls on Sunday with a heavy heart, but also with a sense of quiet defiance, as they cast their ballots just two days after Shinzo Abe, the country’s most influential politician of modern times, was shot dead while making a campaign speech.

This, though, will be an election like no other in recent times, taking place in the immediate aftermath of a crime that will reverberate in the public consciousness well beyond Sunday.While media pundits constructed largely benign versions of Abe’s divisive political legacy, questions swirled around the circumstances leading to his death, at 67, minutes into a campaign address in front of a railway station in the western city of Nara.

Yamagami, a 41-year-old resident of Nara, said he was also “dissatisfied” with Abe, whom he accused of promoting the group. His death has prompted criticism of security arrangements and will almost certainly mean an end to the proximity voters enjoy to candidates at the kind of pre-election rally Abe attended on Friday.A debate about gun laws is unlikely, however. Japan already has an almost zero-tolerance approach to gun ownership, and the weapon that killed Abe is thought to have been home-made.

Less certain is how brightly Abe’s torch will shine in the LDP, whose conservative wing is now emotionally, and ideologically, bereft. His death leaves a political legacy unrivalled in modern Japan, but also a vacuum at the heart of a party that has governed almost uninterrupted since Abe’s grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, helped found it in 1955.

“Although the rightwing of the party is the largest, it lacks an obvious successor with comparable skill, charisma and determination to carry forward its agenda,” said James Brady, Japan analyst at the US advisory firm Teneo.

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