Sanae Takaichi’s landslide capture of Japan’s lower house of representatives – winning 361 out of 465 seats – in the weekend election marks a remarkable turning point in Japan’s post-War history.
With a dramatic gamble on a surprise election and short campaign, the conservative prime minister not only gave herself a new and unchallengeable authority, breaking from the shackles of minority government, but rescued her Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) from what appeared a dangerously steep decline. It has also reset both the country’s relationships with neighbours like China and the region’s security dynamic.
Takaichi has promised to seek to amend the country’s constitution, a pledge associated particularly with its pacifist prohibition in Article 9, which bars the country from maintaining armed forces with the capacity for war. It has long been the LDP’s wish to turn Japan’s defence forces into a conventional army, authorised to operate overseas. Takaichi sees China’s growing threat to Taiwan as a direct threat to Japan’s survival, a threat already interpreted as providing a constitutional authority for overseas troop deployment.
To go further, however, and revise Article 9 and make other unspecified constitutional changes would require a supermajority in both houses, which she does not have, in addition to a popular referendum . It is probably a step too far – for the moment – but is now in the national debate.
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The prime minister, who models herself on Margaret Thatcher’s radical politics, has also promised to implement two key elements of her election programme, a controversial price-cutting suspension of consumption tax on food for two years and a Trump-inspired increase in defence spending. Her tax-cutting and spending agenda had been making bond markets jittery, but yesterday stocks soared to record levels on news of the scale of the victory.
Meanwhile, the LDP, which had hit the headlines due to a string of scandals, is again a dominant force in Japanese politics, courtesy of its charismatic straight-talking leader.
