Two days after Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe was gunned down at a campaign stop, his Liberal Democratic Party and its allies swept to victory in a parliamentary election that gave them a chance to pursue Mr. Abe’s long-held ambition of revising Japan’s pacifist Constitution.
It was the clearest sign that Mr. Abe ⏤ Japan’s longest-serving prime minister ⏤ remained a guiding political force. Even before his death, he was no longer the leader of the country or its governing party, but his legacy shaped voters’ choices at the ballot box and his party’s vision for the future.
“I have the responsibility to take over the ideas of former Prime Minister Abe,” the current prime minister, Fumio Kishida, told a crowd west of Tokyo on Saturday, the day after Mr. Abe’s killing, as he campaigned for their party’s candidates for the Upper House of Parliament…
