Candidates in the race for Japan's next prime minister wrapped up their campaigns yesterday with nationalist frontrunner Shinzo Abe expected to easily trounce his two opponents.

Abe, Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki and Foreign Minister Taro Aso square off today for the post of ruling party president. The winner is all but guaranteed to win the September 26 parliamentary vote for prime minister.

The vote follows a lackluster campaign of which the outcome was never in doubt. Abe, son of a former foreign minister and grandson of a prime minister, has incumbent Junichiro Koizumi's backing and has long led in the polls.

If he clinches the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) ballot today, the 51-year-old Abe currently chief cabinet secretary will go on to become Japan's youngest postwar premier and the first born after 1945.

While Abe has been vague about his plans, he has thrown his backing behind revising the country's pacifist constitution to give the military greater freedom and taking a harder line with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

The latest opinion poll on the race, in the Nihon Keizai business newspaper yesterday, gave Abe 36 per cent support, far ahead of Aso at 20 per cent and Tanigaki at 13 per cent.

The poll, conducted over the Internet from Friday to Sunday, was based on responses from 1,149 eligible voters. The paper did not include a margin of error.

But more importantly than his standing in public polls, Abe reportedly has a crushing majority of LDP votes lined up, ensuring that there will be no need for a run-off after today's ballot.

Abe will take the helm of a Japan in transition.

After five years of Koizumi, reforms have made Japan a more competitive market, powering the economy out of a decade-long slowdown but also widening an increasingly troubling gap between rich and poor.

Japan is also shedding its postwar pacifism. Koizumi pushed for and won the power to dispatch the military in unprecedented missions to help US-led missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite domestic opposition.

The approach, however, has exacerbated friction in Asia, particularly with China and South Korea, who saw Koizumi's unabashedly assertive stance including his visits to a Tokyo war shrine as a sign Tokyo feels little remorse over its wartime aggression in the region.

Abe is unlikely to swerve from his mentor's direction, coming out in full favour of keeping the security alliance with the United States as the cornerstone of Tokyo's foreign policy.

Abe has also championed revising the post-war constitution, which declares Japan a pacifist nation.

His views are "a source of great alarm for South Korea," said Peter Beck, the Seoul-based northeast Asia director of the International Crisis Group.

"It's one thing to talk when you're not in power and another thing when you're in office," Beck said.

The Bush administration has refused to comment on Japan's friction with its neighbours. But two senior congressmen with war memories, Henry Hyde and Tom Lantos, this month urged Koizumi's successor not to go to Yasukuni.

But there will be differences as well. For instance, Abe is seen as more willing to crank up the pressure on the DPRK to back down in its nuclear weapons programme and resolve the cases of Japanese citizens it abducted in the 1970s and 80s.

The fate of economic reforms is uncertain. While Abe has declared the changes must go forward, the perception is growing in the LDP that he will be more receptive to concerns about Japan's eroding egalitarian ethic.

"You cannot stop the reforms, but you have also address the issue of the gap between rich and poor," said Seiko Hashimoto, an LDP lawmaker in the upper house of parliament and Abe supporter.

How Japan's LDP election works

The new Liberal Democratic Party's chief is all but assured the Japanese premiership by virtue of the party's grip on parliament, which is expected to convene on September 26 to elect a successor to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

Below is a summary of key procedures for the ballot.

WHO CAN VOTE

LDP members of parliament

Rank-and-file LDP members and associate members, numbering more than 1 million, through their prefectural chapters

NUMBER OF VOTES

The total number of votes is 703, comprising:

403 LDP members of parliament

300 votes assigned to the 47 LDP prefectural chapters. Each chapter is allotted a basic three votes plus additional votes based on the number of LDP members in the prefecture.

VOTING

The winner must obtain a simple majority of the 703 votes.

If no candidate wins that majority, there will be a second ballot of the 403 members of parliament only. This means that the candidate with most first-round votes could lose in the run-off.

Source: China Daily