Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has dissolved the lower house of the parliament ahead of a snap election.<\/p>\n
The poll,\u00a0announced on Monday\u00a0and which comes a year early, will take place on 22 October.<\/p>\n
Mr Abe is seeking a fresh mandate amid a rebound in his approval ratings and the ongoing North Korea nuclear crisis.<\/p>\n
The right-wing hawk became prime minister in 2012, and his Liberal Democrat Party (LDP) leads a ruling coalition that controls the Diet.<\/p>\n
Mr Abe suffered a\u00a0drop in popularity\u00a0earlier this year over allegations of cronyism.<\/p>\n
But he’s seen fresh support after North Korea\u00a0fired two ballistic missiles over Japan,\u00a0which Mr Abe took a strong stance against.<\/p>\n
His call for a snap election was seen as taking advantage of a weak opposition, and the LDP is still leading in opinion polls.<\/p>\n
But he now faces a new contender in the form of the fledgling conservative Party of Hope, which was only formally unveiled on Wednesday and has already begun attracting some support.<\/p>\n
It is led by the popular Yuriko Koike,\u00a0Tokyo’s first female governor\u00a0and a former television news anchor.<\/p>\n
Several lawmakers from the main opposition Democratic Party, which has been struggling, have already defected to the Party of Hope.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, the Democratic Party’s leader proposed to his members a de facto merger where all their candidates would run under the Party of Hope’s banner, in order to present a united challenge to Mr Abe and the LDP.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has dissolved the lower house of the parliament ahead of a snap election. The poll,\u00a0announced on Monday\u00a0and which comes a year early, will take place on 22 October. Mr Abe is seeking a fresh mandate amid a rebound in his approval ratings and the ongoing North Korea nuclear crisis. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[1351,1388],"class_list":["post-357527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international","tag-japan","tag-shinzo-abe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=357527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357527\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=357527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=357527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=357527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}