Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) leader, Sanae Takaichi, has become the country’s first female prime minister, partnering with a small populist party to try to pick up the necessary votes for a first-round victory in parliament. But the hard-right Takaichi has an uncertain mandate that will likely mean new elections before she can get very far with her ambitious agenda.
Takaichi, 64, takes over from Shigeru Ishiba, who was forced out by the party after a dismal showing in July elections for the upper house of parliament where the long-ruling LDP failed to gain a majority in either chamber. Her path to victory has not been a smooth one. After winning the party leadership on Oct. 4, her ability to get enough votes in parliament was in doubt after the religious-backed Komeito party pulled out of their 26-year alliance.
In response, Takaichi took the already-conservative LDP more clearly to the right by linking up with the Japan Innovation Party, a relatively new grouping of politicians mainly from the Kansai region that includes the major city of Osaka. It gained popularity through a hodgepodge of goals that include, strangely, the end of the LDP’s long hold on power. The party also advocates decentralization, tax cuts, lower spending, and a formal designation of Osaka as Japan’s No. 2 city and backup capital (in reality, Yokohama just south of Tokyo is the country’s second-largest city).
The new alliance better reflects Takaichi’s personal philosophy, especially in the areas of defense and views on China. She is a regular visitor to the controversial Yasukuni shrine in central Tokyo that enshrines Japan’s wartime dead, including numerous war criminals, and which also hosts a museum that gives an ultranationalist account of the war. While prior visitors like former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe have framed it as a private religious matter, China and South Korea both strongly object to the visits.
Takaichi wants to further strengthen Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, a program already underway with plans to raise defense spending to a level of 2 percent of annual GDP by 2027. While not officially setting a new target, she could raise funding to something closer to the 5 percent level reportedly requested by the Trump administration.
One of Takaichi’s first set of negotiations will be over related demands by U.S. President Donald Trump that Japan effectively underwrite the cost of the U.S. military bases in Japan, in effect saying that they serve no U.S. interest. (China would no doubt offer much better financial terms for its use of the facilities). This will come to the fore quite quickly, with the new leader having less than a week to cram ahead of a planned meeting with Trump on Oct. 27-29.
“Takaichi models herself as the heir to former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who set the gold standard for dealing with Trump. The trick for her will be not just following his policies, but his ability to charm a mercurial president,” said Jacob M. Schlesinger, head of the United States-Japan Foundation that promotes bilateral ties. “It will be interesting to see how the new factor of gender plays into this relationship. Trump has, at best, an uneven track record at working with women leaders, either in the U.S. or abroad.”
Another sticking point will be the U.S.-Japan trade agreement negotiated by the Ishiba administration. While Tokyo threw a lifeline to Toyota by winning lower import tariffs on cars, it also agreed to a seemingly one-sided bargain in which the country will invest $550 billion, equal to 13 percent of its total economic output in a year, into projects selected under Trump’s direction, with 90 percent of the profits to accrue to the United States. Takaichi has talked of renegotiating the deal but will likely look to use the fine print in the agreement to basically run out the clock.
On domestic economic issues, Takaichi is more populist than conservative. While she has recently started talking about the government debt load, which is the highest in the world, her focus has been on helping lower-income workers through targeted tax credits. At the same time, she brings a Horatio Alger philosophy that things would be better if everyone just worked harder, saying she models herself after former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
“Compared to the Kishida and Ishiba administrations, which prioritized raising the minimum wage, her philosophy leans more toward ‘rewarding those who work hard’ rather than ‘protecting the vulnerable’—a distinction likely to become increasingly evident in her policies,” the Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute said in an October research report.
In practice, raising the minimum wage would help the large body of struggling young women, since women are estimated to represent 70 percent of minimum wage earners.
Her social conservatism is part of the reason that while Takaichi’s election represents something of a watershed moment in a male-dominated society, it has not brought much cheer from those advocating greater diversity.
She opposes same-sex marriage, is against allowing an empress as head of state, eschews regulations meant to reduce working hours (which are designed to help working women who still do most of the family work), and opposes legislation to allow women to use their own names after marriage. Technically, a woman can keep her name if her husband agrees to drop his, which happens in about 5 percent of marriages, including in the case of Takaichi’s husband, a politician.
To help burnish her feminist credentials, Takaichi promised to have more women in the traditionally male-dominated cabinet, including Satsuki Katayama, a former senior official at the ministry of finance, as finance minister. She also reached out to her rivals for the LDP leadership. Toshimitsu Motegi is set to be named foreign minister for a second time, Shinjiro Koizumi will serve as defense minister, while Yoshimasa Hayashi is set to continue his role as minister of internal affairs and communications.
She will have more fence-mending to do. There is also little affection for Takaichi from her former partners in Komeito. Party leader Tetsuo Saito said that in recent talks, Takaichi refused to make any commitments over a long-running fundraising scandal within the LDP. “They failed to present any direct action that would be taken towards a full investigation or towards fulfilling their responsibility to explain the new facts that have come to light recently,” Saito said.
For Takaichi, the divorce might have been part of the plan. Given her hard-line approach, her administration would have been uneasy bedmates. In addition, Komeito is, like Japan overall, something of an aging society and has done badly in the past three elections. As demonstrated in the July upper house vote, young Japanese appear increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo. Takaichi may do better with fresh faces such as the Japan Innovation Party, and potentially the newer and even more controversial Sanseito Party, which went from one to 15 seats in the upper house vote on a platform of Japan First.
“There is a strong sense of crisis among the members of the Diet in the LDP, so in order to regain the support of the conservatives, Ms Takaichi, a hardliner, must be made president,” said Chiyako Sato, a columnist with the Mainichi newspaper in Tokyo.
But the sudden dissolution of the Komeito relationship carries a new set of risks. The party is backed by the Soka Gakkai Buddhist religious group, whose members, estimated at 8 million households in Japan, have been a highly reliable get-out-the-vote machine for Komeito and by extension the LDP. With that powerful machine now on the other side of the fence, the LDP may see even worse results in a new election. An analysis by the Nikkei newspaper calculated that without Komeito backing, some 20 percent of current LDP lawmakers could lose their seats.
With the rise of Sanseito and the election of Takaichi, much of the political commentary has been around the idea that this represents a seismic shift for Japanese politics. With her leadership of a new right and the jettisoning of the pact with Komeito, the liberal side of the LDP could decide they are no longer welcome and team up with more left-leaning parties such as Komeito to create a more policy-based two-party system.
But such ideas have come and gone in the past, especially when the LDP suffered its rare losses of power in 1993-96 and 2009-2012. Each time, however, the party heavyweights managed to right the ship and quickly returned to power with new faces in front of the old political forces.
Instead of a formal party realignment, the LDP playbook would be to wait for a while and then, if necessary, work from the inside to force out Takaichi and look for a more consensus-oriented leader.
The mechanics would not be difficult. The new alliance is still two seats short of power in the lower house of parliament, leaving the new administration vulnerable to any faction that threatens to throw its toys out of the crib over any policy it does not like.
At a minimum, this means that Takaichi will need to spend large amounts of time, and political capital, just to avoid mutiny in the ranks. When she won the LDP leadership, Takaichi vowed that she would “work, work, work.” She will need to if she wants to avoid being the latest rotation in Japan’s revolving door of political leadership.
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