The Japanese leader’s election gambit, fueled by the power of her personality and some unlikely help from young voters consumed by “Sanamania,” appears to have paid off.
Japan’s conservative prime minister Sanae Takaichi has won a landslide victory after she gambled on a high-stakes snap election.
Takaichi, who took office in October after being elected leader of the governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), surpassed the 310 seats needed for a supermajority in the 465-seat lower house, Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported from the official election count on Sunday evening. The supermajority allows her ruling coalition to override the upper house, where it lacks a majority.
An NHK exit poll as voting ended earlier on Sunday projected the LDP would win between 274 and 326 seats. The party and its coalition partner Ishin were projected to win a combined 302-366 seats, as voters turned out amid freezing temperatures in a rare winter election.
Heavy Metal Japan
I’m really curious if Japan will manage to outwork their population collapse. Maybe if all of them can work 20 hours a day like their leader they will do just fine without immigrants?
Once driven into a corner they can only double down on the ideology - that lead to their current position.
Japanese already overwork enough that their productivity per hour is abysmal within their peer group. That hand is overplayed as is.
Why are the Japanese leaning ultra-nationalist conservative?
I kind of get it in the States. The US has always leaned fundamentalist religious and more conservo-libertarian, more skeptical of federal government.
I kind of get it elsewhere, like the UK or Brazil.
But Japan? I thought they were… more urban? I thought work burnout + a population age cliff was their existential crisis, so why would they vote for less immigration and less control over that, unless I’m misunderstanding the platform?
They are pretty close to North-Korea which has nukes. They feel only ultra-nationalist conservatives will defend them well against NK & China.
Also the US is their major ally and turned right wing as well.
They feel only ultra-nationalist conservatives will defend them well against NK & China.
By all indications, cost of living and stagnant wages are the highest priority across the board. Overtourism is usually second or third. NK is hardly a consideration. China (and even Russia) are higher but mostly among ultranationalists due to territory disputes and Chinese investors buying up property.
They seem heavy into their culture and traditions. Foreigners always destroy that stuff.
Japan is more or less the Israel of East Asia.
“Why would the country spawned from the Japanese Empire without significant reeducation against fascism descend towards fascism…”
Japan is ultra racist. Always has been. It probably has something to do with them living on islands, separated from other ethnic groups.
Cult of personality + foreigners bad. LDP went further right since Sanseito and other anti-foreigner-spewing parties took a chunk of their voters in the last election. This correctly showed that they would go back to LDP (though Sanseito still lives).
The main opposition, CDP, merged with Komeito, LDP’s former coalition partner, to form a new centerist party (mostly to the right of the former CDP). Komeito has ties to Sokka Gakkai which, in my personal opinion, is a cult. This put off people voting on any of their new candidates. They also didn’t have time to really solidify things since the election came so fast (I suspect this was either very last-minute or not fully baked by the time the election was called).
Some other parties did get more seats. Team Mirai was one, though they seem to also have a bit of a vague platform in some regards and, at worst, may turn out to be DOGE-like techbros. Time will tell.
For parties left of center, with the CDP being gone, there are only a couple. The JCP (Japanese Communist Party) is not actually a communist party anymore but stubbornly refuse to rebrand and people are still scared of them (they’re more social democrats or somewhere thereabouts).
This seems like a good overview, thanks.
The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP; Japanese: 自由民主党, romanized: Jiyū-Minshutō), also known as Jimintō (自民党), is a major conservative[14] and nationalist[15] political party in Japan.
I’m so fucking confused. This is why Japan’s population is in decline.
Everywhere outside of the US, ‘Liberal’ means right-wing
It means that in the US too. Just less than the other right-wing party… who is also liberal.
nah, parties label themselves in🇺🇲 correctly.
you have to study more theory.
Well relatively speaking. Up until the Trump era both major parties in the US were essentially liberal parties before the Republicans became a far right party. The right wing nationalists in other countries would probably be moderate Democrats by US standards.
Why do I think that this result has pitched an idea to the UK PM’s head?
Welcome to the party Japan! You’re gonna regret this in about 4-6 months after it’s to late…
japan is fucked up
Enjoy your flavor of authoritarian rule with an ultra nationalist regime Japan. Hope voting for a personality was worth it. Pray you’ll have elections come next time cause they’re going to be “fraudulent” with a need to be “reformed”
I’m also expecting the Japanese animation studios are going to be more muzzled with their content and LGBTQ if any will be shown now
I may be overreacting, but as an American, everything I said has happened here
Pray you’ll have elections come next time cause they’re going to be “fraudulent” with a need to be “reformed”
She does want to reduce the number of reps in one of the houses, but that’s all I’m immediately aware of. Another party wanted to restrict naturalized citizens more, but I don’t think that made its way to the LDP platform.
The “next time” for elections in Japan is also a little less set since the PM can dissolve the lower house whenever triggering an election a couple weeks later. There are also other elections on other schedules. I don’t see it going that far at this time, personally.
Well, with a supermajority the next election would most likely be when it legally has to be.
Yeah this move was essentially to reset the counter to a full 4 years in the lower house. The ldp loves scandles, though, so she might step on a rake and we see some sort of pm election and another general
you’re not.
For those who don’t know who the fuck she is, she is a ultranationalist conservative that worships Hitler.
I only read to the point of personality cult and it was obvious.
also backed by russia i believe, the political party is funded at least, its not surprising.
Do you have anything showing this backing by Russia? I’m curious at what the connection would be.
Yeah. Nowhere have I ever seen the ldp being accused of taking Russian money and there’s really no reason to.
Would love to see an actual source for that claim.
Not really, she is in the main party and she is antichina and wants to spend more on military defense.
Jesus wept, you’d think you could count on the Japanese to be wary of Russia
Currently, in Japan, it is a major issue that her party’s video has been viewed 160 million times on YouTube. Of course, the majority of those views are thought to have been for advertising purposes.
She is a far-right politician who advocates “countermeasures against foreigners,” but she paid a large sum of money to Google, a foreign tech giant, to win the election.
At the very least, online election advertising will likely be an issue for discussion in the upcoming Diet session.
Cancelling my vacation to Japan.
I’ll go somewhere that’s not run by fascists instead.
deleted by creator
I mean it’s not a bad place fot sightseeing but…it fucking sucks to be Japanese
Just go before her measures kick in
they already have
That pool seems to be shrinking rapidly these days…
I know little more from Japan than the mainstream culture knowledge. That said, Japan is said to be a place where people are cold and distant. So, things starting getting more social, they get more tourists, and then instead of relaxing in relation to the social sphere, Japan is like: “No, let’s be more cold and distant.”. Yeah, that will work.
I don’t think that’s exactly right as someone in Japan for more than a decade now.
Overtourism is a separate problem. With the yen weakening compared to other currencies, it made things more affordable. A lot of the tourist industry also collapsed around Corona and the strict (to those external) lockdowns here. That meant there also were fewer accommodations, tourism staff, etc. here. This compounded the problems.
With Corona also came increased prices of a lot of goods and salaries were largely staying stagnant. Having a bunch of extra people buying things up on the cheap yen also meant those things were harder to get for locals. Add to this the JA (basically an ag cartel) and bad weather causing bad rice harvests and people can’t even get the staple that has defined Japanese life for centuries. There’s a lot of simmering anger there. The additional influx of tourists also means that Japanese can’t even travel domestically as cheaply. Hotel prices in some areas have more than doubled since corona and peoples’ salaries have not.
There’s a whole lot going on. I could add a ton of (often illegal) short-term rentals (think Air BnB or similar) pricing people out, foreign (largely Chinese) investors buying land and buildings pricing out the locals is also causing issues. A lot of this boils over to stronger anti-foreigner sentiment that was a real hit in the last election last year and somewhat carried forward this year.
The LDP’s former coalition partner broke off with their rightward turned and formed a new party combining with the main opposition. This meant the main opposition party shifted to the right and also now had ties to Sokka Gakkai which also made them unpalatable to at least some voters. Allegedly, there’s still Moonie money and involvement in the LDP, but I haven’t followed that news much. The LDP’s rightward shift, though, did pick up those tired of the “foreigner issues” (lovely that they rarely distinguish actual residents from tourists, innit) voters who went to other parties. I’ll certainly shed no tears for the more racist parties losing seats, but this is still worrying overall.
Team Mirai, a new party of young people, did pick up votes. They claim to aim for transparency and come from mostly IT backgrounds. The worry here is they’re a bit too into the Dodge type of thing in the US, that they may be very tech-bro types, and they want to use AI for stuff. I don’t know yet. I am no fan of AI and certainly don’t want Dodge tech-bro bullshit coming in. Who knows.
I can’t vote as a non-citizen anyway. If things get bad, I’ll just have to uproot my whole life and move again, but I certainly hope it never gets there.
Terrible but expected news.
She wasn’t gambling. This wasn’t a huge risk. Big news outlets have become dinosaurs struggling to understand a new world. Her team calculated this win using modern viral social media strategies and polling metrics. It’s not just gEnZ that is swayed by social media. Wake up NBCeeple; the Trump virus hath spread.
I wonder where they got analyst that said this was a real risk? Because when a supermajority was on the table no analyst worth their salt would make a prediction over 16 percentage points across because that’s a guess.
deleted by creator
Bruh
