Tokyo:
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling bloc won a convincing victory in an upper house election on Sunday, media exit polls showed, giving the hawkish leader a mandate for his recipe to revive the economy, while ending a political deadlock and setting the stage for Japan's first stable government since 2006.
Abe, who returned to power after his Liberal Democratic Party-led coalition's big win in a December lower house poll, has said he will stay focused on fixing the economy with his "Abenomics" mix of hyper-easy monetary policy, fiscal spending and structural reforms.
But some business leaders and others with a stake in Japan's revival worry that Abe will weaken his resolve for reform in the face of a resurgent LDP, or shift to focus on the conservative agenda that has long been central to his ideology: revising the post-war pacifist constitution and recasting Tokyo's wartime history with a less apologetic tone.
© Thomson Reuters 2013