A populist party that began on YouTube helped disrupt Japan's ruling coalition

Mint

a day ago

TOKYO—The surprising success story of Sunday's election in Japan was a political party born online during the pandemic that tapped into a wellspring of discontent over issues galvanizing voters worldwide: inflation, immigration and a political class dismissed as elitist and out of touch.
Sanseito—which translates as the participate-in-politics party—is into organic farming and worshiping the Emperor, and isn't keen on vaccines or foreigners. It polled fourth in Sunday's parliamentary election, helping to deprive Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba's ruling coalition of its majority in the Japanese Diet's upper house, an upset that complicates trade negotiations with the U.S. just days before sweeping new tariffs are due to come into force.
The breakthrough marks yet another example of right-wing challenges to established political parties that have transformed politics in Europe and the U.S., such as Germany's AfD, Britain's Reform UK or Donald Trump's Make America Great Again movement.
Just as those groups have drawn on angst over immigration, Sanseito's anti-foreigner rhetoric has found fertile ground in a country that is slowly opening up to newcomers to fill jobs in its rapidly aging society and where worries over surging tourism abound.
'There is frustration there and they profited from that frustration," said Tobias Harris, founder of Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm Japan Foresight.
Sanseito didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sanseito leader Sohei Kamiya has railed at shadowy globalists he says are keeping Japan down.
Sanseito has its roots in a conservative YouTube channel started by its current secretary-general, a spiky-haired former teacher called Sohei Kamiya, and two other political junkies who have since left the party.
Dissatisfied with Japan's political old guard, their channel was devoted to setting up a political party from scratch and Sanseito was founded in early 2020.
Kamiya ran on a Sanseito ticket in 2022 in an upper house election, winning a seat that wasn't up for grabs this time around. Including Kamiya, Sanseito now has 15 lawmakers in the 248-member upper house and three in the 465-member lower house. That gives it some scope to put forward its own ideas as bills but no chance of seeing them pass without other parties' support.
Sanseito advocates a bundle of policies similar to other right-wing populists, whose platforms are distinct from the free-market, small-government conservatism that dominated the electoral right for years. It supports expansionary fiscal policies including more spending on child care and tax cuts. In line with the pronatal policies of leaders such as Hungary's Viktor Orban, it wants women to be less career-focused and have more children.
It also espouses antivaccine views that brought it to national attention during the Covid-19 pandemic and is hostile to chemical fertilizers, echoing some of the themes of U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Make America Healthy Again program. Sanseito bemoans the fact that Japan imports food, saying its goal is for 100% self-sufficiency in food by 2050.
In stump speeches, Kamiya frequently railed at shadowy globalists he says are keeping Japan down. The party wants to ditch Japan's pacifist constitution that was drafted largely by the U.S. in the wake of World War II, and create a new one that harks back to an earlier, more spiritual age when the Japanese emperor was the head of state and the focus of national reverence.
Analysts say Sanseito's success in Sunday's vote owes much to two phenomena: immigration and inflation, as well as a general dissatisfaction with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and the unpopular Ishiba, especially among right-leaning voters who feel the party has drifted too far from the conservatism of the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Sanseito has pledged to limit immigration and curb the rights of foreigners living in Japan, whose numbers had grown to 3.5 million as of Feb. 1, according to Japan's statistics bureau, from 1.7 million a decade earlier. Such an increase, while small in terms of Japan's population of around 120 million, has been jarring for some Japanese, many of whom are also upset at high levels of tourism and foreign purchases pushing up real-estate prices, both of which Sanseito promised to rein in.
Consumer prices in Japan, meantime, rose 3.3% year over year in June, outpacing wage growth and squeezing household incomes.
After a long spell of low or no inflation, Japanese voters are extra sensitive to price increases, said David Boling, director of Japan and Asian trade at Eurasia Group, a consulting firm. The run-up in inflation after the pandemic proved fatal for incumbent governments in a run of elections around the world in 2024; in Japan the reckoning has just come a little later, he said.
The question now is whether Sanseito can build on its gains and get a shot at real political power. It has only a marginal presence in the Japanese parliament's more-powerful lower house, and has shown little appetite to work with big parties to advance its agenda. Japan's political system frequently throws up new political groups that vanish quickly.
'New parties are cheap in Japan. They come and go," said Paul Sheard, an economist and author who followed Japan for years in senior positions at financial firms including S&P Global and Nomura.
Still, he said Sanseito has identified a rich potential seam of voters who believe they aren't being catered to by the main parties, including a swath of younger, social-media savvy Japanese attracted to the party's do-it-yourself, antiestablishment ethos.