Japan PM Under Fire Over Suicide, Pension Mess

Japanese Prime Shinzo Abe's cabinet met on Tuesday as fallout swirled from a scandal-tainted minister's suicide and mismanaged pensions.

Japanese Prime Shinzo Abe's cabinet met on Tuesday as fallout swirled from a scandal-tainted minister's suicide and mismanaged pensions, threatening the ruling camp's chances of winning a July upper house election.

Agriculture Minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka's suicide on Monday, hours before he was to face questioning in parliament, coincided with a slump in Abe's approval ratings ahead of a July upper house election, his first big electoral test.

On Tuesday, a former executive of a public corporation at the centre of a bid-rigging scandal to which Matsuoka had been linked was found dead in an apparent suicide, Kyodo news agency said.

"I am worried that (recent developments) will have considerable impact on the upper house election," Environment Minister Masatoshi Wakabayashi, who will fill in as farm minister told reporters after the regular cabinet meeting.

"It will be tough for the Liberal Democratic Party."

Matsuoka, 62, had come under fire for a series of political funding scandals, and questions about his suitability for the farm post were raised as soon as he was appointed in September.

"The responsibility of Prime Minister Abe, who appointed Mr Matsuoka as cabinet minister and who protected him after suspicions were raised, is not small," said an editorial by the conservative Sankei newspaper.

"This is a major blow ahead of the upper house election." A loss by the ruling coalition in the upper house election would not force Abe to resign, since the more powerful lower chamber elects the prime minister. But defeat would allow the opposition to block key legislation and a major loss would almost certainly spark calls from his own party for him to step down.

Analysts say a setback for Abe's pro-market government in the poll could sour foreign investors' view on Japanese stocks.

Abe's popularity had sagged sharply ahead of the suicide, mostly because of voter outrage over the failure of the government to keep track of some 50 million pension premium payments, meaning retirees could be short-changed.

Anger over corruption was another factor.

A survey by the Asahi newspaper conducted before the suicide and published on Tuesday showed Abe's support rate had sunk to 36 percent, down eight points from just a week ago and the lowest level since he took office in September.

The decline mirrored that of two polls published on Monday.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki told a news conference the government would "do all we can to secure public confidence in public pensions".

"ACT OF FRAUD"

Opposition parties have threatened to submit a no-confidence motion against the health minister on Tuesday if the ruling camp goes ahead with its plan to push through the lower house a bill to drastically reform the scandal-plagued Social Insurance Agency, which manages public pensions.

"The short-term blow is very bad for the cabinet," said Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Sophia University. "But once interest runs out, there is still time before the actual campaign," he added, noting Matsuoka's death had deprived the opposition of an easy target to attack.

Abe, at 52 Japan's youngest prime minister since World War Two, was brought in by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) last September on hopes his youth and dapper style would buoy support for the party ahead of the upper house poll.

He soon won praise on the diplomatic front for repairing ties with China that had chilled under his predecessor.

But support for Abe, who is pushing a conservative agenda that includes revising Japan's pacifist constitution and boosting its global security role, sagged after gaffes and funding scandals, including one that forced a minister to resign.

Critics charged that Abe was returning the long-ruling LDP to the vested interest politics that have angered voters in the past and shortened the stays in office of several prime ministers until Abe's predecessor, the popular maverick Junichiro Koizumi, managed to keep his post for more than five years.

The LDP and its junior partner need to win a total of 64 of the 121 seats up for grabs in the July election to maintain their majority in the 242-seat upper house. Some analysts had said that would have been tough even before the latest developments.