Updated ,first published
Singapore: The Sanae Takaichi era has arrived.
Japan’s first female prime minister outperformed even the generous predictions of a majority win at Sunday’s general election, and instead secured a historic landslide that handed her party its biggest victory in 70 years.
The win delivers Takaichi, a conservative national security hawk, a clear mandate to pursue her stimulus-powered economic agenda, ramp up Japan’s defence spending, tighten immigration controls, and start the reform process to change the country’s pacifist Constitution.
It also vindicates her decision to take a firm hand with China, after refusing to cower to relentless pressure from Beijing over her comments suggesting Japan could intervene in a conflict over Taiwan.
But she confronts an extraordinary challenge in turning around Japan’s economic woes while paying for her spending promises – which include a massive $195 billion stimulus package, increased military spending, and a $45.8 billion plan to temporarily cut the food consumption tax. Japan already has the world’s highest public debt-to-GDP ratio.
Takaichi gambled on calling a snap election in the height of winter, just three months after narrowly winning an internal party leadership challenge to replace beleaguered leader Shigeru Ishiba.
She wagered that her soaring personal popularity could rescue her Liberal Democratic Party from the political doldrums where it had diminished to minority status in both houses of parliament, mired in scandal and widely disdained by voters.
She was right.
The LDP has secured 316 seats, giving it a clear absolute majority in Japan’s 465-member House of Representatives. Together with its coalition partner, the Japan Innovation Party, the LDP will control 75 per cent of the seats in the parliament – the threshold needed to override votes in the upper house, where Takaichi does not have a majority.
“This was a historic victory, the biggest LDP landslide since its inception in 1955,” says Jeff Kingston, a political scientist at Tokyo’s Temple University.
“She helped many of her colleagues win back seats or win for the first time, and it is united behind her while the opposition is in disarray, losing more than half of its pre-election seats.”
Her victory was buoyed by her ability to find new wells of support in younger voters, while also drawing back conservative voters that had bled to the new anti-immigration upstart party, Sanseitō.
The win sets up Takaichi to step onto the world stage with renewed confidence, and reaffirms Japan as the stable pillar of democracy in East Asia after years of leadership turmoil, which saw her become the country’s third prime minister in a year last October.
For Canberra, Takaichi’s victory will cement the trajectory of increasingly close defence ties with Tokyo, building on the decision last year to buy 11 Mogami-class warships to replace the ageing Anzac-class frigates.
Some analysts spy an opportunity for Canberra to leverage Takaichi’s fledgling status as a “Trump whisperer”, in a bid to shore up US support for countering an increasingly assertive China in the Indo-Pacific. The US president has made clear his support for Takaichi – a protege of his friend, late Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe – and on Sunday said her “bold and wise decision to call for an election paid off big time”.
“Takaichi’s visit to Washington in March is a vital opportunity for Japan, Australia and other US allies to persuade Trump not to make a grand bargain with Chinese President Xi Jinping when he visits Beijing in April,” says Alex Bristow, from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
Meanwhile, China’s browbeating of Takaichi has backfired. Not only did it not deliver the backdown Beijing sought, it enabled Takaichi to project an early image of strength and resolve on both the domestic and international stage – a gift for any leader still finding their feet.
There’s a question now of whether Beijing will decide to lower the volume and find an off-ramp to this months-long feud, or double down. Meanwhile, Takaichi will be tested in how she responds to Beijing’s increasing naval pressure around Japan’s southern archipelago and near Taiwan.
All of this sets an uncertain stage for Takaichi and Xi’s next potential meeting later this year, when China hosts the APEC summit in Shenzhen in November.
“The key question is whether relations can be restored to a level where meaningful dialogue is possible by then,” says Kawashima Shin, a politics expert at the University of Tokyo.
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Lisa Visentin is the North Asia correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. She was previously a federal political reporter based in Canberra.Connect via X or email.
