Latest news with #populism
New York Times
11 hours ago
- Politics
- New York Times
No One Controls MAGA — Not Even Trump
Apart from supplying endless fodder to journalists and Democrats, the White House's attempts to put a lid on the Jeffrey Epstein affair provide a useful test for a question that will matter more the deeper we travel into Donald Trump's second term: Namely, to what extent does MAGA populism exist as a political force distinct from the impulses and whims of its red-hatted leader? The popular answer has always been that it doesn't, that MAGA is just a cult of personality in which any ideological reversal will be tolerated so long as the Great Man sets the course. But this confuses the personal bond between Trump and his core supporters, which is unlikely to be severed by any mere policy dispute, with his ability to persuade those supporters to actually change their substantive views, where his powers are more limited. The president is an especially potent avatar for the broad populist impulse across the West. But he did not create that impulse, and he doesn't single-handedly decide what it demands or where it ends up. Instead, there is an ongoing negotiation between what the president would like to do and what his voters will accept. In some cases, what MAGA wants acts as an ideological tether on Trump's political impulses. You can see this especially on immigration, where the president's personal restrictionism still leaves room for some kind of wide door in his big, beautiful wall. Depending on which interest group Trump is talking to, that door could be open for farm and hotel workers, or for H-1B visa recipients, or for foreign college students hoping to have a green card stapled to their diplomas. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Daily Telegraph
19 hours ago
- Politics
- Daily Telegraph
‘Make Japan Great Again' movement gains momentum as right-wing party rallies against immigration, gender policies
Don't miss out on the headlines from World. Followed categories will be added to My News. Japan has always revered quirky parts of US culture. First it was baseball, then it was rock music. And now ... populist Trump-style conservatism. Right-wing firebrands like Javier Milei in Argenitna and Giorgia Meloni of Italy have made strong careers railing against 'elitism,' 'globalism' and immigration. It's part of a movement capitalising on widespread frustration with left-wing politics. In all cases, mainstream parties were accused of virtue‑signalling by championing diversity and climate goals at the expense of working-class costs. And now, a growing cohort in Japan is following suit. On Sunday, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba's coalition lost its upper‑house majority, but out of that redux emerged Sanseito, the 'Japanese first' party. Founded just five years ago, it surged from just two seats to 15 in one election, marking a massive shift in the political tendencies of the nation's 124 million citizens. Sanseito's playbook mirrors the arcs of Trump's 'Make America Great Again,' Germany's AfD and Nigel Farage's Reform UK. They call for tighter immigration controls, a pushback to 'globalism,' a rollback of 'radical' gender policies, and skepticism toward decarbonisation, vaccines, and pesticides. Leader Sohei Kamiya, a 47-year-old former teacher and supermarket manager, pledges to 'bring power back to the people' and squeeze out what his party believes to be a deeply corrupt political system. It's a line that has worked exceptionally well throughout history, especially when targeting audiences disillusioned with mainstream parties. While the party is picking up speed, public polling paints a slightly different picture. Immigrants in the island nation rank low on voters' worry lists. Inflation and employment prospects are more widely accepted as the biggest issues facing Japan. The nation's immigration intake is tiny by developed-nation standards, but it hasn't stopped Sanseito from mining the all-too-familiar vein. Leader Sohei Kamiya, a 47-year-old former teacher and supermarket manager, pledges to 'bring power back to the people'. (Kyodo News via AP) There is a mounting exhaustion amongst the Japanese population, which has for decades endured a rigorous and demanding working culture based on sacrifice, only to feel as if their nation and their own future prospects are moving backwards. 'Too many newcomers equals crime, rising housing costs, dangerous driving — and, critically, suppressed wages,' Kamiya says. 'It's fine if they visit as tourists, but if you take in more and more foreigners, saying they're cheap labour, then Japanese people's wages won't rise. 'We are not exclusionary. We have never called to drive out foreigners.' Online fact-checkers have flagged claims propagated by the group's supporters, including ones accusing foreigners of racking up 'almost $3 billion of unpaid medical bills annually' or a doubling of Chinese welfare recipients in just half a decade. Fact-checkers aside, it is clear there is a mounting exhaustion amongst the population, which has for decades endured a rigorous and demanding working culture based on sacrifice, only to feel as if their nation and their own future prospects are moving backwards. Japan's disillusioned wage‑earners are fed up with stagnation, employment opportunities and rising costs. Many believe mainstream left‑leaning parties prioritise gender agendas, climate policies or open‑borders moral posturing at the expense of ordinary households. 'They put into words what I had been thinking about but couldn't put into words for many years. When foreigners go to university, the Japanese government provides subsidies to them, but when we were going to university, everyone had huge debts,' a 44‑year‑old IT worker, locked into a precarious short‑term contract, told AFP reporters. Demonstrators take part in a 'protest rave' against racism and nationalist party Sanseito ahead of the upper house election in the Shinkuku district of Tokyo, Sunday, July 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Louise Delmotte) Eight NGOs, backed by over 1,000 groups, have warning growing right-wing sentiments are straying too close to xenophobia. (AP Photo/Louise Delmotte) Just like in the US, analysts from the Japan Institute of Law and Information Systems warn of Russian bot networks fuelling 'large‑scale information manipulation,' aided by AI‑powered language translation. Sanseito's campaign included pro‑Russia interviews via Russian state media. Kamiya, however, claimed he's no Moscow puppet and publicly denounced the war in Ukraine. 'Russia's military invasion (of Ukraine) was of course bad, but there are forces in the United States that drove Russia into doing that,' he said. But as Sanseito gained momentum, Ishiba's ruling LDP party quickly pivoted. It declared a mission of 'zero illegal foreign nationals' and promised tighter residency enforcement. Eight NGOs, backed by over 1,000 groups, protested that move, warning it strayed too close to xenophobia and that the argument that 'foreigners are prioritised' is totally unfounded'. There has also been a significant resistance movement against the party, with demonstrators taking part in a 'protest rave against racism' ahead of the upper house election over the weekend. -- with AFP Originally published as 'Make Japan Great Again' movement gains momentum as right-wing party rallies against immigration, gender policies
The Independent
20 hours ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Can no one silence Nigel Farage's latest populist dogwhistle?
Apparently, there's a debate going on in the upper echelons of the Labour government about what to do about Nigel Farage. Not a moment too soon, you might say. The choice, as it's been posited by Labour insiders, is whether to 'confront' or 'deflect' Reform UK. Farage's populist insurgency has picked up lots of local councils, won a by-election – just – and settled in the opinion polls around 25 to 30 per cent ahead of Labour. Not so long ago, it was an unthinkable situation. Something similar has been going on in the Conservative camp since they lost the general election, and, as we see, it seems the immediate answer to their version of the Farage-ist challenge is to reshuffle the shadow cabinet, bring back James Cleverly, and let Kemi Badenoch have some more time. They can't work out if they want to collaborate with Farage, or confront him. Both parties actually show signs of appeasing him and aping his policies, from welfare to refugees. It's not good. It's worth reminding the mainstream parties what happened last time they were too fastidious to take an ascendant Farage down, which was the Brexit referendum campaign. It was, as it still is, incredibly time-consuming and tiresome to have to fact-check every vague promise and extravagant claim Farage comes out with, and the easiest thing is just to call him an extremist/populist/fascist/xenophobe/racist or whatever and try to ignore him. Well, we all know what happens. As Farage himself might say: 'They're not laughing now!' Much the same – less forgivably – goes for the media. Not that it's an easy job trying to verify whatever casual claims Farage comes out with in real-time, but it means he tends to go unchallenged. Take his appearance on the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show. He claimed, off the top of his head, that cancelling net zero – an amorphous concept, in any case – would save some £30bn a year, and said that 'even' the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), 'a tool of the Establishment,' said so. Kuenssberg had neither the time nor the evidence in front of her to cite Section 4 of the OBR report on long-term fiscal risks that showed that £20bn of the £30bn is due to the loss of fuel duty in the transition to electric cars. If some new levy on electric vehicles was introduce to replace the lost revenues in petrol and diesel sales, the additional cost to the taxpayer would be down to £10bn a year. The OBR has said in 2021 and apparently endorsed again now that 'the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero.' Which happens to be true. I'm definitely not criticising Kuenssberg here, because no interviewer – even with a researcher in her earpiece – could counter that in time, nor make the argument about how the UK has indeed helped big polluters like China and India at least sign up to CO2 reduction targets – and China is now leading the world in green tech and electric vehicles. We had the same sort of thing at the press conference where Farage said he'd cut crime in half in five years. The £30bn net zero thing came up again, but the Q&A session wasn't well suited to pinning him down over it. Asked how he'd pay for his sketchily costed plans to hire another 30,000 police, build 'Nightingale prisons', new 'custody suites', restore the magistrates courts, send 'Britain's worst offenders' to jail in El Salvador, and bang up an unknown number of serious offenders for life, he tossed out a figure of £50bn to £70bn that could be found from scrapping HS2 – even though it's pretty much been run down and the money diverted to other road and rail projects by Rishi Sunak. No one thought to ask exactly how Farage would halve crime, how the plan would work in practice, and why, if he could achieve that improbable outcome, that he couldn't abolish crime completely in 10 years. When Farage does get cornered, as when Kuenssberg pressed him on whether he believes in climate science, and the antics of Reform UK councillors, he has some stock get-outs, and, like so much else he does, they're straight out of the Trump playbook. Tactic one is to say he doesn't know anything about some story so he can't answer and doesn't know if what's referred to is true. Second, he can just say that no party's numbers ever add up anyway – the 'experts' are always wrong and it's not worth bothering about. Third, is the superficially plausible line that if he gets more people 'with real business experience' into government they'll sort things out, just like Trump and Musk did in America – and Reform's pretend DOGE team is trying and thus far failing to do in Britain's skint county councils. Like Trump in the US, Farage is inviting a public more than usually disillusioned with politicians to turn to brilliant business people such as, erm, Zia Yusuf and Richard Tice, and perhaps even the former commodities trader: Farage himself. I suppose I'm just stating the obvious, really, which is that Farage's Trumpian brand of populism and its amplification in the right-wing client press and social media presents a challenge to the mainstream parties, and real independent journalism that they have not been able to cope with. A lot of that failure is, frankly, down to something like laziness, and a reluctance to do the hard graft of countering the lies and busting the myths about economics, immigration, crime and the rest that Reform constantly pump to 'flood the zone', as they say in the states. It is tedious to get your head around, say, carbon budgets and remember all the key crime stats for London, because no one carries that much stuff around in their heads. But our leaders could confront Farage a little harder and with a bit more effect than they've managed so far. We could, let's say, push him much harder on why getting the Royal Navy to take irregular migrants back to Calais is a violation of French sovereignty, and would threaten a Cold War with France and the rest of the European Union in retaliation, with huge damage to trade and the economy. He's been getting away with this sort of nonsense for far too long, and now it's getting dangerous. He needs to be confronted – but who is going to do it?
News.com.au
21 hours ago
- Politics
- News.com.au
‘Make Japan Great Again' movement gains momentum as right-wing party rallies against immigration, gender policies
Japan has always revered quirky parts of US culture. First it was baseball, then it was rock music. And now ... populist Trump-styled conservatism. Rightâ€'wing firebrands like Javier Milei in Argenitna and Giorgia Meloni of Italy have made strong careers railing against 'elitism,' 'globalism' and immigration. It's part of a movement capitalising on widespread frustration with left-wing politics. In all cases, mainstream parties were accused of virtueâ€'signalling by championing diversity and climate goals at the expense of working-class costs. And now, a growing cohort in Japan is following suit. On Sunday, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba's coalition lost its upperâ€'house majority, but out of that redux emerged Sanseito, the 'Japanese first' party. Founded just five years ago, it surged from just two seats to 15 in one election, marking a massive shift in the political tendencies of the nation's 124 million citizens. Sanseito's playbook mirrors the arcs of Trump's 'Make America Great Again,' Germany's AfD and Nigel Farage's Reform UK. They call for tighter immigration controls, a pushback to 'globalism,' a rollback of 'radical' gender policies, and skepticism toward decarbonisation, vaccines, and pesticides. Leader Sohei Kamiya, a 47-year-old former teacher and supermarket manager, pledges to 'bring power back to the people' and squeeze out what his party believes to be a deeply corrupt political system. It's a line that has worked exceptionally well throughout history, especially when targeting audiences disillusioned with mainstream parties. While the party is picking up speed, public polling paints a slightly different picture. Immigrants in the island nation rank low on voters' worry lists. Inflation and employment prospects are more widely accepted as the biggest issues facing Japan. The nation's immigration intake is tiny by developed-nation standards, but it hasn't stopped Sanseito from mining the all-too-familiar vein. 'Too many newcomers equals crime, rising housing costs, dangerous driving — and, critically, suppressed wages,' Kamiya says. 'It's fine if they visit as tourists, but if you take in more and more foreigners, saying they're cheap labour, then Japanese people's wages won't rise. 'We are not exclusionary. We have never called to drive out foreigners.' Online fact-checkers have flagged claims propagated by the group's supporters, including ones accusing foreigners of racking up 'almost $3 billion of unpaid medical bills annually' or a doubling of Chinese welfare recipients in just half a decade. Fact-checkers aside, it is clear there is a mounting exhaustion amongst the population, which has for decades endured a rigorous and demanding working culture based on sacrifice, only to feel as if their nation and their own future prospects are moving backwards. Japan's disillusioned wageâ€'earners are fed up with stagnation, employment opportunities and rising costs. Many believe mainstream leftâ€'leaning parties prioritise gender agendas, climate policies or openâ€'borders moral posturing at the expense of ordinary households. 'They put into words what I had been thinking about but couldn't put into words for many years. When foreigners go to university, the Japanese government provides subsidies to them, but when we were going to university, everyone had huge debts,' a 44â€'yearâ€'old IT worker, locked into a precarious shortâ€'term contract, told AFP reporters. Just like in the US, analysts from the Japan Institute of Law and Information Systems warn of Russian bot networks fuelling 'largeâ€'scale information manipulation,' aided by AIâ€'powered language translation. Sanseito's campaign included proâ€'Russia interviews via Russian state media. Kamiya, however, claimed he's no Moscow puppet and publicly denounced the war in Ukraine. 'Russia's military invasion (of Ukraine) was of course bad, but there are forces in the United States that drove Russia into doing that,' he said. But as Sanseito gained momentum, Ishiba's ruling LDP party quickly pivoted. It declared a mission of 'zero illegal foreign nationals' and promised tighter residency enforcement. Eight NGOs, backed by over 1,000 groups, protested that move, warning it strayed too close to xenophobia and that the argument that 'foreigners are prioritised' is totally unfounded'. There has also been a significant resistance movement against the party, with demonstrators taking part in a 'protest rave against racism' ahead of the upper house election over the weekend.
News24
a day ago
- Politics
- News24
MAGA-style makes a move in Japan: Sanseito party increases seats in upper house
The populist Sanseito party increased its representation in Japan. It is modelled on Donald Trump's MAGA movement. Surveys have put immigration far down the list of voters' concerns. Populist ideals are gaining traction in Japan, spurred by right-wing politicians running rampant elsewhere railing against 'elitism', 'globalism' and immigration. While Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba's coalition lost its upper house majority in an election on Sunday, the 'Japanese first' Sanseito party, created only five years ago, increased its seats from two to 15. Sanseito's agenda comes straight from the copybook of right-wing movements such as US President Donald Trump's 'Make America Great Again', the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Nigel Farage's Reform party in Britain. This includes 'stricter rules and limits' on immigration and foreign capital, opposition to 'globalism' and 'radical' gender policies, and a rethink on decarbonisation and vaccines, and pesticide-free agriculture. Founded on YouTube, Sanseito will 'bring power back to the people', party leader Sohei Kamiya, a 47-year-old former teacher and supermarket manager, wrote in the Japan Times. Surveys have put immigration far down the list of voters' concerns, who are much more worried about inflation and the economy. But for Sanseito, the influx of newcomers into Japan - where the immigration its economy badly needs is far lower than in other developed countries - is to blame for a host of ills from crime to rising property prices to dangerous driving. 'It's fine if they visit as tourists, but if you take in more and more foreigners, saying they're cheap labour, then Japanese people's wages won't rise,' Kamiya said at a campaign. We are not exclusionary. We have never called to drive out foreigners. Sohei Kamiya Meanwhile online platforms have been flooded with disinformation, some of which Japanese fact-checking groups and the government have debunked. Some posts falsely claimed that foreigners leave almost $3 billion of medical bills unpaid a year, or that Chinese residents on welfare doubled in five years. At a Sanseito election rally in front of Tokyo's Shinagawa station, where orange T-shirted party workers handed out 'Stop destroying Japan!' flyers, one voter told AFP she was finally being heard. 'They put into words what I had been thinking about but couldn't put into words for many years,' said the 44-year-old IT worker on a precarious short-term contract. 'When foreigners go to university, the Japanese government provides subsidies to them, but when we were going to university, everyone had huge debts.' Russian bot accounts have been responsible for 'large-scale information manipulation', according to a much-read blog post by Ichiro Yamamoto from the Japan Institute of Law and Information Systems think-tank. This has been helped by artificial intelligence enabling better translation of material into Japanese. More understanding toward Russia - something which was long anathema for Japanese right-wingers - is also a theme for Kamiya. 'Russia's military invasion (of Ukraine) was of course bad, but there are forces in the United States that drove Russia into doing that,' Kamiya told AFP, denying he is 'pro-Russia'. He was forced during his campaign to deny receiving support from Moscow - which has been accused of backing similar parties in other countries - after a Sanseito candidate was interviewed by Russian state media. As in other countries, the rise of Sanseito and its success has prompted the government to announce new immigration policies, and other parties to make promises during the election campaign. Ishiba's LDP proclaimed the goal of achieving 'zero illegal foreign nationals' and said the government will strengthen the management system for immigration and residency status. Eight NGOs issued a joint statement last week, since backed by over 1 000 groups, raising the alarm on 'rapidly spreading xenophobia'. 'The argument that 'foreigners are prioritised' is totally unfounded demagoguery,' the statement said. Hidehiro Yamamoto, politics and sociology professor at the University of Tsukuba, said that populism has not caught hold before because the LDP, unlike established parties elsewhere, has remained a 'catch-all party'. 'The LDP has taken care of lower middle-class residents in cities, farmers in the countryside, and small- and mid-sized companies,' Yamamoto said. And pointing to the rise and decline of other new parties in Japan in the past, he isn't sure Sanseito will last. 'You can't continue gaining support only with a temporary mood among the public,' Yamamoto said.
