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.
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.
Terrible but expected news.
Hmm, I just realized that I (an American living in New Zealand) have no idea what Japanese politics are like. To Wikipedia!
Takaichi has been described as holding hard-line conservative and Japanese nationalist views,
uh oh
citing former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher as a role model and deeply influential on her personal political beliefs.
Uh oh
Like Thatcher, she is called the “Iron Lady”.
Uh Oh
Takaichi is a member of Nippon Kaigi, a far-right ultraconservative organisation
UH OH
that argues for a reinterpretation of Japanese history
RED ALERT
amongst ultranationalist lines.
WELP
Oof. Well, I guess it had to happen to Japan someday. It’s happened everywhere else. Here’s hoping it doesn’t last long and the damage is minimal.
It more accurately happens like every second or third PM and then things swing to another faction of the LDP (or, historically rarely since WWII ended, another party though the last times that happened they faceplanted pretty quickly and it went back to the LDP)
Hey look at it this way, we may finally get our mechs out of this.
I mean, they may be the last thing you see, but at least we may see them.
Bruh
Takaichi is known for favouring proactive government spending. She supports heavy government investment in critical strategic sectors in what she refers to as “crisis management investment”. These include artificial intelligence, semiconductors, nuclear fusion, biotechnology, and defence.
Her other policies aside, the economic one looks like a winner.
I’m sure the shareholders will be happy.
Yeah, you’re probably right. Just looked at unionization rate and it’s around 16%. Workers won’t see much from this investment.
Funny exerpt from wiki:
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the U.S. Occupation authorities initially encouraged the formation of independent unions, but reversed course as part of broader anti-Communist measures.
The cold war era propaganda and policies have really fucked everything up. There’s a straight line between them and today’s Republican/MAGA party that runs right through Reagan’s economic policies. MAGA sits at the crossroads of that and the festering racism that was never dealt with following the civil war. Unfortunately America’s world police mentality (and CIA fuckery, another result of the cold war) has spread those policies and attitudes to a bunch of other countries (who all for some strange reason have a dominant conservative media company owned by Rupert Murdoch, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence right?).
Japan has struggled with horrendous xenophobia for pretty much their entire history so this isn’t really surprising even if it is disappointing. Unfortunately we’re seeing a rise in far right parties around the globe and there are depressingly few liberal governments left. If this keeps up it’s not going to take much to ignite WW3 with all these nationalists taking control.
Completely agree. A lot of countries were on some path or another of dealing with liberal capitalism’s collapse that gave us The Great Depression. The propaganda you mention steered these changes right back to the right - towards oligarch class dominance over working people, like it used to be before the depression. Unsurprisingly we find ourselves in a situation very reminiscent to the pre-depression environment.
She looks like a traditional japanese mask and that worries me.
