The decision by Shinzo Abe, the Prime Minister of Japan, to dissolve parliament and call a snap election is a risky but justified gambit. If it succeeds and Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party wins reëlection, he will have a mandate to intensify his efforts to rescue what is still the world’s third-largest economy from two decades of stagnation. If it fails and Abe loses power, the prospects for Japan, an aging society that is still gripped by the psychology of deflation, are dire.

The trigger for Abe’s move was the news that the Japanese economy has fallen into another recession. On Monday, the government announced that the country’s G.D.P., after contracting sharply in the second quarter, fell again in the third quarter—meeting the technical definition of a recession. Coming just a year after Abe had announced that his stimulus policies had worked, and that, as he put it, “Japan is back,” the onset of recession was interpreted in some quarters as evidence that “Abenomics,” an all-encompassing policy stance designed to stimulate the economy and break the pattern of deflation, which took hold about twenty years ago, had failed.

But that isn’t true: Abenomics didn’t fail. It worked better than expected for a year or so, only to trip itself up needlessly.

Following Abe’s election, in December, 2012, and his introduction of a fiscal stimulus, G.D.P. growth accelerated, and so did hiring. With Haruhiko Kuroda, the veteran official Abe installed at the Japanese central bank, fully committed to a Federal Reserve–style policy of quantitative easing—creating money and using it to purchase financial assets—the Japanese stock market rose sharply, as did several indicators of business confidence. Crucially, expectations emerged that the country would see sustained price increases. But then Abe, yielding to deficit hawks who were concerned about Japan’s large debt burden, agreed to introduce a big increase in the sales tax.

It is an elementary precept of Keynesian economics that tax increases lead to a fall in aggregate demand and, thus, to a fall in output. The tax hike, introduced this April, hit the economy hard. Consumer spending plummeted, business investment stalled, and G.D.P. fell sharply. In the second fiscal quarter, it declined at an annual rate of more than seven per cent. Abe’s economic team expected things to rebound strongly in the third quarter, but that didn’t happen. Instead, G.D.P. fell again, this time at an annualized rate of 1.6 per cent. Although some of the weakness can be attributed to an unexpected decline in business inventories (which may well reverse course), consumer spending and corporate investment were also disappointing.

Before Abe increased the sales tax, a number of commentators had warned that he was making a big error. Recent economic history, encompassing examples from the United States in 1937 to Japan in 1997, shows that a premature tightening of policy can easily derail growth in an economy that has undergone a lengthy slump—especially one that has fallen into a liquidity trap, in which traditional monetary policy is ineffective. In March of this year, Anatole Kaletsky, the chief economist at Gavekal Dragonomics, said that the tax increase could well precipitate another recession. Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary, said, “I worry about a larger jolt in Japan than many expect.” Such statements proved all too prescient.

Even now, though, it is much too early to write off Abenomics, and earlier still to abandon the policy framework. Despite the collapse in G.D.P. growth, some aspects of the approach are still working. After years of declining prices, which encouraged consumers and companies to save rather than spend, most Japanese firms are now expecting inflation to average 1.5 per cent over the next five years, according to a recent survey. “It’s clear that the deflationary mindset has been wiped out, even if inflation is not as high as the 2 percent the BOJ [Bank of Japan] is aiming for,” Tsuyoshi Ueno, a senior economist at NLI Research Institute, told Bloomberg News last month. The emergence from deflation is a very encouraging development, and it’s not the only good news for the Japanese economy. Big exporters, such as Honda and Toyota, continue to benefit from the sizable devaluation in the yen that Abenomics has engendered. In an economy that has always been oriented toward exports, this augurs well for the future.

But consumer confidence has taken a big hit, and, even before this week, it was clear that drastic actions were needed to revive public sentiment and put the economic recovery back on track. On October 31st, the Bank of Japan surprised the markets by announcing that it was expanding its quantitative-easing program. And at about the same time, Japan’s trillion-dollar Government Pension Investment Fund, which manages the retirement assets of millions of the country’s families, announced that it was shifting more money into Japanese stocks.

Although these moves gave the Nikkei stock index a temporary lift, they weren’t sufficient to change the national mood. Hanging over everything was the threat of a second tax increase aimed at stabilizing Japan’s debts, which now amount to more than two hundred per cent of G.D.P. Abe had agreed to raise the sales-tax rate from five per cent to eight per cent, which he did in April, and from eight per cent to ten per cent, a change that was supposed to take place in October of next year. Even after it became clear that the initial tax increase was having a big negative impact, many figures in the Japanese financial establishment, including Kuroda, argued that the government should stick with this timetable in order to preserve its credibility with the markets. Lately, though, the commitment to a second tax hike has seemed like a recipe for another lengthy slump.

In his television address announcing that he would seek reëlection, Abe sought approval to delay the second tax increase and to intensify his stimulus program, which also involves making overdue structural reforms to the Japanese economy, such as encouraging more women to enter the labor force, relaxing tight constraints on immigration, and tackling the country’s notoriously strong business lobbies. Abe also challenged his opponents to come up with an alternative set of policies, noting, “There is criticism that Abenomics is a failure. So what should we do? Unfortunately, I have yet to hear one concrete idea.”

Abe is right. There’s no convincing reason why a country that is as advanced, well-educated, and hard-working as Japan should remain stuck in an economic rut for decades on end—even if it has run up a great deal of debt. Viable policy options exist to confront deflation, to effect a permanent exit from the liquidity trap, and to get the country growing again, sustainably. These policies aren’t easy to market or enact, but, after years of being saddled with pedestrian leadership, Japan has finally found a Prime Minister, in Abe, who is willing to take some of the necessary measures and confront the people who oppose them. In agreeing to the first tax increase, he made a big error, which he is now seeking to correct. Anyone who wishes Japan (and the world economy) well should hope he gets reëlected.