Populism and polarisation come to Japan

Mint

5 days ago

The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Japan's long-time ruling party, suffered a historic setback at upper-house elections on Sunday. The party and its smaller coalition partner, Komeito, lost 19 seats. That will leave them governing without a majority in Japan's upper chamber for the first time since 2013. This poor showing is a nightmare for prime minister Ishiba Shigeru, who took office in October. His ruling coalition had already lost its majority in the lower house. Mr Ishiba called the result a 'harsh verdict' and said he intended to stay on. But calls for his resignation are mounting.
The LDP remains the single largest party in both chambers of Japan's parliament. But the results on Sunday confirm that its long dominance of Japanese politics is under real threat. Its greatest challenge is not the established centre-left opposition, the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP), which in the election maintained its seat tally in the upper house. Instead it is political upstarts that are luring away the government's voters.
The Democratic Party for the People—a centrist outfit led by Tamaki Yuichiro, who has populist flair—more than doubled its seats, from nine to 22. That makes it the second-largest opposition bloc in the upper house, after the CDP. The Do It Yourself Party (Sanseito), a hard-right outfit with an anti-immigration message, also made a breakthrough. It jumped from two seats to 15 (Kamiya Sohei, its leader, is pictured). These newish parties appear to have energised voters: turnout increased to 59%, the highest level since 2012.
The LDP was on the defensive long before polling stations opened. In recent years scandals have tainted the party's image. Mr Ishiba, the 68-year-old scion of a political family, has struggled to give his outfit new appeal among the young. Most of all, 'voters were dissatisfied with the LDP's response to inflation,' says Uchiyama Yu of the University of Tokyo. Prices have risen steadily since 2022. Wages have not been keeping up; in real terms they have fallen for five months straight.
During the campaign parties of all stripes promised voters tax breaks and other giveaways. That unsettled investors, who were already worried about Japan's public debt (around 130% of GDP). In particular, opposition parties called for a cut in the consumption tax, currently 10%. In response Mr Ishiba, a fiscal hawk, promised a one-off cash handout of 20,000 yen ($136) per resident. As it turns out, that pledge was too meagre to win over many voters. And it irked many of the party's existing supporters, who saw it as shallow and reactive.
Yet it was immigration, not the economy, that dominated the final days of electioneering. Because Japan's native-born population is declining, the country is becoming increasingly reliant on migrant workers to fill jobs. The number of foreign workers reached a record 2.3m last year. That is still only around 3% of the workforce (compared with around 20% in Britain and Germany) but is three times higher than a decade ago. Sanseito, the hard-right party, accused the government of importing cheap labour at the behest of big business. It claimed this was holding down the wages of locals, and caused other problems.
Sanseito's 'Japanese First' slogan struck a chord. At a recent street rally in Saitama, an area near Tokyo, a party speaker compared the movement to MAGA in America and the Alternative for Germany, a hard-right party. Koeda Yoshiyuki, a 51-year-old supporter, called Sanseito 'the only party that can truly tackle the big problems Japan faces today'. Sanseito relied on social media, especially YouTube, to reach voters disheartened with politics-as-usual. Legacy outlets tried to debunk its dubious claims, including that foreigners are pushing up crime and have been buying up big swathes of land. Many voters apparently did not listen.
What will the LDP do now? Its policymaking is about to become even more constrained: lacking a majority in either chamber, it will need to negotiate with other parties to pass legislation. It could try to expand its coalition by bringing in one more of them. But all the likeliest candidates have so far rejected this idea.
Mr Ishiba's days as prime minister are surely numbered, even if he is insisting he will stay. The LDP could soon seek to install a fresher face, such as Koizumi Shinjiro, the charismatic 44-year-old son of a former prime minister, who as agriculture minister has been handling the government's response to a rice-price shock. Alternatively, the party could move to the right in hopes of fending off the challenge from Sanseito: Takaichi Sanae, a hardline nationalist who competed against Mr Ishiba in last year's LDP leadership race, has already hinted she would consider another tilt at the top job. For years Japan had seemed to escape the populism and polarisation that has upturned politics in many other rich democracies. That is clearly no longer the case.