Abe's agenda on line as Japan votes

TOKYO(AFP) - Japan voted Sunday in an election predicted to deliver a stern rebuke to outspoken conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and possibly pressure him to quit. Abe, who has championed building a more assertive nation prouder of its past, has come under fire over a raft of scandals including the government's mismanagement of the pension system.
Nearly 105 million people are eligible to vote in the election for half the seats in the 242-member upper house of parliament, which opinion polls predict could switch to opposition control. Voting stations opened at 7:00 am (2200 GMT) and will stay open until 8:00 pm (1100 GMT), after which the first exit poll results are expected.
It is the first nationwide election for Abe, who is Japan's first premier born after World War II and has quickly got to work on ending legacies of the defeat, such as rewriting the US-imposed pacifist constitution. But Abe's popularity has nosedived in the 10 months since he took over from popular leader Junichiro Koizumi. Two ministers have quit and another committed suicide after allegations of financial wrongdoing. Opinion polls have also shown voter outrage over the pension agency's admission that it bungled millions of payment records, a sensitive issue in one of the world's most rapidly ageing countries. "Mr. Abe had a very good image when he first took office. But I started to dislike him after the pension problem came to light," said voter Takako Kakizawa, 65.
"I've already started receiving pension benefits, but I'm worried that maybe the amount I'm getting is smaller than what I should receive," she said.
A defeat would not automatically oust Abe as his Liberal Democratic Party-led coalition enjoys a large majority in the more powerful lower house inherited from Koizumi. Prime ministers have traditionally quit to take responsibility for defeats in upper house polls, although Abe's aides have insisted he is not considering resignation and there is no clear successor. Analysts and media reports predicted that Abe would step down if the returns were unexpectedly bad for the ruling party, which has already come to terms with likely setbacks. Before taking office Abe was best known as an advocate for strong action on North Korea. In power, he has also helped improve relations with China and South Korea that were badly strained over war memories. But Abe, at 52 Japan's youngest post-war premier, has struggled to battle voters' perceptions that he lacks authority. In the campaign, he has styled himself as a broad-minded reformist, saying he will shake up the pension system as well as pushing through favoured causes such as constitutional reform. But Izuru Makihara, a professor of politics at Tohoku University, said the end result was "a failure to convey a clear message to voters."
"Abe has touched on too many different issues from national security to education to the reform of the bureaucracy, and then he was forced to add on the pension problem," he said. Opposition parties have seized on Abe's woes to try and win over traditional supporters of the Liberal Democrats, who have ruled Japan almost continuously since 1955 and have not lost a majority in either house in nine years. The main opposition Democratic Party has tried to win over farmers and other rural voters disgruntled with Koizumi's free-market reforms that were meant to lift Japan from its decade of recession in the 1990s. The world's second largest economy is in the midst of its longest post-war expansion, but critics say that the countryside has been left out of the boom in Tokyo and other major cities.