In an effort to enhance popular support for the party, the LDP presidential campaign took advantage of a heightened sense of crisis centered on Japan’s territorial disputes with Russia, South Korea, and, most recently and alarmingly, China. The party chose as its leader former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is known as the hardest of hardliners on nationalist matters, but who is also widely perceived as having acted irresponsibly when he abruptly gave up his premiership in 2007, after only one year in office, due to health problems.