Japan’s Conservative Prime Minister Aims To Solidify Her Power in Elections for New Diet

Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, is hoping for an election landslide tomorrow to solidify her grip on power after a fast-and-furious 16-day campaign for all 465 seats in the lower house of the Japanese parliament, or Diet. Her fear is that she’s doing so well in popularity ratings, three months after the Diet elected her prime minister, that millions of her supporters will not bother to vote. Barely 53 percent of 105 million eligible voters cast ballots in the elections in October that made her Japan’s first female prime minister.Ms. Takaichi, 64, “feels a sense of crisis over the overwhelming victory report,” the conservative newspaper Sankei Shimbun, an advocate of her policies, quoted her as telling a crowd in Tokyo on the last day of campaigning. “I almost cried because there are people who think that they don’t have to go to the polls. Please, please give me your important vote.”For Ms. Takaichi, the elections represent an unnecessary gamble after she cobbled together a coalition of her long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party and the minor Ishin or Japan Innovation Party. She was so sure of her popularity, however, that she dissolved the Diet and set another round of elections believing she is strong enough to go it alone.“We have no choice but to let the people decide whether Sanae Takaichi is fit to be prime minister,” Japan’s liberal Asahi Shimbun quoted her as saying as she opened the briefest campaign period since World War II. A survey conducted by Asahi shows the LDP will win more than the 233 seats needed for a majority in the Diet and may secure “a landslide” with more than 300 seats. Asahi said the main opposition Centrist Reform Alliance is struggling and could see its 167 pre-election seats reduced “by half.”“I’m hearing that Takaichi will win a big landslide,” a teacher in Osaka, William Ives, tells The New York Sun. “The whole country is leaning towards the right.”Although Ms. Takaichi would rather not have to form a coalition, she can count on right-wing parties to support her as she battles to increase defense spending to 2 percent of Japan’s gross domestic product of $4.28 trillion last year, the world’s fourth largest after America, Communist China and Germany.Among them, the Sanseito or “Do It Yourself” Party, which won two seats in the Diet in the last election, is hoping to win 14 or 15 seats with a populist message inspired by President Trump’s MAGA or “Make America Great Again” movement.As for Mr. Trump, he’s totally behind Ms. Takaichi, whom he saw in Tokyo soon after her election in October. On Truth Social, he praised her as “someone who deserves powerful recognition for the job she and her Coalition are doing.” He added, “It is my Honor to give a Complete and Total Endorsement of her, and what her highly respected Coalition is representing.”He did, however, urge her in a phone call a few weeks later not to aggravate China after Beijing jumped on her for implying that Japan would view any attack on the island democracy of Taiwan as a matter of Japan’s survival. The inference was that Japan would join Taiwan in a war against mainland Chinese forces.“A resounding victory could hand Takaichi new clout in an escalating dispute with powerful neighbor China,” said Japan Today, a conservative website. But, it noted, “Beijing has shown no signs of backing down.”An analyst in Tokyo, who did not want his name used, was not optimistic about the Japan-China dispute calming down. “I fully expect Xi Jinping to turn the screws even tighter to punish her over her Taiwan remarks,” the analyst tells the Sun.“Part of her popularity lies in the idea that she will stand up to Beijing. But with President Trump apparently hungry to make deals with Xi, she may find she has little leeway.”

Japan’s Conservative Prime Minister Aims To Solidify Her Power in Elections for New Diet

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