Approval rating for Abe Cabinet stays high at 72%

Senin, 22 April 2013 01:09

(TOKYO-Kyodo) The approval rating for the Cabinet of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe remains high at 72.1 percent, up 1.0 percentage point from the previous poll, a Kyodo News survey showed Sunday.

It was the third time that the Cabinet approval rating has topped 70 percent since Abe's Liberal Democratic Party came to power in December.

The survey, conducted over the weekend, showed that 24.1 percent of those polled think their income will increase under the economic policies of the Abe administration, while 69.2 percent think that it will not.

On electoral reform, one of the key issues currently being debated in parliament, 54.0% of respondents said a measure to reduce the disparity in vote values should be implemented simultaneously with broader electoral reform involving a cut in the total number of Diet seats.

The poll result comes after a series of recent high court decisions that termed the outcomes in some constituencies in the December 2012 general election to be unconstitutional because of the disparity in the value of votes between depopulated rural areas and populated urban ones.