The partisan pushing of the contentious security package through the Diet by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling coalition is the wrong way to enact legislation that marks a major shift in the nation's postwar defense posture and merits a broad-based political consensus to ensure stability in its future implementation. Support that the alliance secured from three minor conservative parties toward the end of the process has served only as a flimsy excuse to demonstrate that the coalition was not unilaterally forcing the legislation through the Diet.
Abe might argue that the opposition camp has always opposed the Liberal Democratic Party-led government's policies on matters relating to defense and security, ranging from revising the Japan-U.S. security treaty in 1960 to the 1992 law on Japan's participation in United Nations-led peacekeeping operations. In the face of criticism from constitutional scholars that the security legislation is unconstitutional, senior LDP leaders said when the Self-Defense Forces were created in 1954, most academics at the time said the move violated the war-renouncing Constitution — and that Japan would have been in danger if the government had listened to them. Do they want to say that history has proved that the government was right?
The Abe administration, on the strength of the LDP-Komeito alliance's dominance in the Diet over the splintered opposition forces, refuses to heed dissent over its policies. Abe's remark in the Diet stating that while he admits popular support for the security legislation has not grown, "public understanding will certainly spread as time passes after it is enacted," symbolizes his disregard for the importance of Diet discussion and dialogue with the public to win support for government policy.