TOKYO — Japanese candidates made final appeals on Saturday ahead of an election expected to restore the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to power and give hawkish former premier Shinzo Abe a second shot at running the world's third biggest economy. An LDP win on Sunday would usher in a government committed to a firm stance in a territorial row with China, a pro-nuclear energy policy despite last year's Fukushima disaster and a radical prescription for hyper-easy monetary policy and big fiscal spending to beat deflation and tame a strong yen. Media surveys suggest the LDP will win a big majority in parliament's powerful 480-seat lower house, just three years after a crushing defeat that ended more than 50 years of almost non-stop rule by the business-friendly party, although many people were undecided in surveys just days before the vote. Together with a small ally, Abe's LDP could even gain the two-thirds majority needed to break through a policy deadlock that has plagued successive governments for half a decade. “It really looks more like an avalanche than a landslide,” said Gerry Curtis, a professor at New York's Columbia University and a veteran Japan expert. Abe, 58, who resigned as premier in 2007 after a troubled year in office, has been talking tough on a row with China over tiny islands in the East China Sea, although some experts hold out hope he will temper his hard line with pragmatism. The soft spoken grandson of a prime minister, who looks set to become Japan's seventh premier in six years, also wants to loosen the limits of a 1947 pacifist constitution on the military, so Japan can play a bigger global security role. “We will firmly restore the US-Japan alliance and regain our diplomatic power,” Abe said in his final pitch to a crowd, many waving Japan's national flag, in Tokyo's Akihabara district, a high-tech centre. “And together with you all, we'll protect our beautiful seas and territory, no matter what,” he said to applause and cheers. The LDP, which promoted atomic energy during its decades-long reign, is expected to be friendlier to utilities seeking to restart nuclear reactors taken off-line after the Fukushima disaster, triggered by an earthquake and tsunami on March 11 last year. — Reuters
