Shinzō Abe, Prime Minister of Japan

Shinzō Abe (安倍 晋三) was a Japanese politician who has been Prime Minister of Japan and President of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) since 2012. He previously served as Prime Minister from 2006 to 2007 and Chief Cabinet Secretary from 2005 to 2006. In early 2019, Abe surpassed Shigeru Yoshida to become the second-longest serving Prime Minister in post-war Japan and is currently the third-longest serving Prime Minister in Japanese history.

Born into a politically prominent family, Abe first entered the House of Representatives in the 1993 election. He rose to be appointed Chief Cabinet Secretary by Junichiro Koizumi, before replacing Koizumi as LDP President in September 2006. He was subsequently confirmed as Prime Minister by a special session of the National Diet, becoming, aged 52, Japan's youngest post-war Prime Minister, and the first to have been born after World War II. Abe resigned in September 2007, citing health reasons, shortly after his party lost the House of Councillors election that year. He was replaced by Yasuo Fukuda, the first in a series of five Prime Ministers who each failed to retain office for more than sixteen months.

After recovering from illness, Abe staged an unexpected political comeback, defeating former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba in a vote to become LDP President for a second time in September 2012. Following the LDP's landslide victory in the general election that December, he became the first former Prime Minister to return to the office since Shigeru Yoshida in 1948. He was later re-elected in similar landslides in the 2014 and 2017 elections.

Abe is a conservative whom political commentators have widely described as a right-wing nationalist. He is a member of the revisionist Nippon Kaigi and holds revisionist views on Japanese history, including denying the role of government coercion in the recruitment of comfort women during World War II, a position which has created tension with neighboring South Korea. He is considered a hard-liner with respect to North Korea, and advocates revising Article 9 of the pacifist constitution to permit Japan to maintain military forces. Abe is known internationally for his government's economic policies, nicknamed Abenomics, which pursue monetary easing, fiscal stimulus, and structural reforms.

• From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinzo_Abe, accessed 31 July 2019.