Victory for Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic party in this weekend’s upper house election has implications beyond Japan. Mr Abe need not call a general election until 2016. Barring a leadership challenge from within his party, that means he will spend four years in office – and possibly more – a lifetime compared to the fleeting appearances of most Japanese prime ministers of recent years.
For a brief moment at least, polls indicate he is also the most domestically popular leader in the Group of Seven and heading an economy that – improbable as it seems – is likely to be the fastest growing among them this year.
This makes Mr Abe a leader to contend with. Barack Obama, US president, was openly tired of Japan’s revolving-door leadership, which made clinching deals on everything from a military base realignment in Okinawa to negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership all but impossible. Less so now. Beijing too was wary of offering anything concrete to successive prime ministers from the now-ousted Democratic party of Japan, although the DPJ was ostensibly more friendly towards China than the LDP. The irony is that Beijing now has little choice but to engage Mr Abe’s more hardline government. Indeed, China should put aside preconditions over disputed islands – which have prevented the leaders from meeting – and agree to a resumption of top-level talks. The relationship between the world’s second and third-biggest economies is too important to keep in the deep freeze.