How a far-right ‘Japanese First' party made big election gains
Kamiya said he is open to cooperating with other emerging parties, but he's expected to wait in the hopes of gaining more seats in the more powerful lower house. His ambition is to have more influence to possibly form a multiparty coalition like those in Europe.
Sanseito, which translates to 'Participate in Politics,' started in 2020 when Kamiya gathered people on YouTube and social media to create a political group to attract voters discontent with conventional parties.
The group began to grow as its members started winning seats in local assemblies, stepping up its presence and grassroots support base.
After the start of the coronavirus pandemic, his online approach quickly got traction, fueled partly by an anti-vaccine stance.
Sanseito achieved a foothold in national politics in 2022 when Kamiya won a six-year term in the upper house. The party won three seats in the October election in the lower house.
The party holds 15 seats in the upper house, compared with the 122 held by Ishiba's governing coalition, but Kamiya has been steadily reaching a much larger audience.
Sanseito has gained more than 100,000 YouTube subscribers over the past few weeks to nearly 500,000, compared to the the LDP's 140,000.
Sanseito party stood out from Japan's other parties, with a tough anti-foreigner stance as part of its 'Japanese First' platform, apparently inspired by U.S. President Donald Trump's 'America First' policy.
Under his slogan, Kamiya proposes a new agency to handle regulations on foreigners. During the election, the party campaigned for stricter screening for allowing Japanese citizenship and to exclude non-Japanese from welfare benefits.
Critics say that the party's stance has encouraged the spread of xenophobic rhetoric in the election campaign and on social media, prompting other ultraconservative candidates to be outspoken. A typical claim is that a rapid increase in foreign workers has hurt Japanese workers' wages and that foreigners use a large share of welfare benefits and have made Japanese society unsafe.
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