After a strong showing in an election overshadowed by the killing of former premier Shinzo Abe, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida may have fresh momentum to hike defence spending on a scale beyond the grasp of his slain mentor.
In doing so, Kishida, a moderate from Hiroshima who wants nuclear weapons banned, would expand on Abe's hawkish legacy and ensure support from Liberal Democratic Party hardliners loyal to Abe.
"If he can achieve that, the conservatives within the party will flock to Kishida and he will have a long-term administration, no doubt about it," the lawmaker added.That conservative support is critical, since Kishida has pursued economic policies that diverge from the neo-liberalism Abe favoured. Control of the factious LDP would allow Kishida three years to execute his programme before another election.
Beijing now spends more than four times as much as Japan on defence, a ranking of 2021 global defence budgets by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute shows."Kishida is riding a virtually unprecedented wave of support in Japan for increasing the defence budget," said Christopher Johnstone, a senior adviser and Japan chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies .Annual increases north of 6 percent to 7 percent are "plausible", Johnstone added.
Kishida now has a "green light" for more defence spending, said Robert Ward, Japan chair at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. An "appropriate" increase would be about 20% or roughly 1 trillion yen, he said, adding that the extra funds should go to maintenance and logistics to ensure the military can deploy the planes, ships and other fighting assets it already owns.
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