a day ago
Japanese PM's election blow, amid rise of far right
Andy Park: Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba has vowed to stay on despite his ruling coalition losing power in the country's upper house. His coalition now looks on course for the worst results since it was founded last century. One surprise was the dramatic rise of the far right Sanseito party with its Japanese first campaign and warnings about a quote silent invasion of foreigners. The world's fourth largest economy faces an August 1st deadline to strike a deal with the US on trade. Donna Weeks is a specialist in Japanese politics and professor emeritus at Musashino University. She joined me earlier from Tokyo. Welcome to you, emeritus professor.
Donna Weeks: Thank you, Andy. Good to be with you again.
Andy Park: How much of a crushing blow is this result for the incumbent Prime Minister who's suffered his second poor election result in less than a year?
Donna Weeks: Well, that's right. And I think for a Prime Minister to lose the majority in one election is tough, but to lose it twice, it's going to raise a lot of questions for where Ishiba goes next. Obviously, last night as the results coming through, he expressed his intention to stay on. But Monday morning, the morning after, there's some within the governing LDP who want to see him go and make some changes since he's been effectively, they say, rejected by the electorate twice now.
Andy Park: What effect has inflation, particularly from a consumer perspective, the jump in the cost of rice had on sentiment in this election?
Donna Weeks: This has been really interesting. I think as we see with trends right around the world, the cost of living has hit Japan and Japanese people quite a lot. And that has certainly been one of the factors that people have looked at. And the rice issue over the last year or so, that doesn't seem to be getting solved. And there's, you know, when we get right down to the nitty gritty of some of the results in former LDP strongholds where rice farmers would just walk in and support the LDP, we've actually seen in some of those areas that one of the democratic parties has actually won some seats. So there's no sort of consistency, if you like, across the results. They're really quite scattered and it's probably going to take me a couple of days to work my way through them. It's been really interesting.
Andy Park: What do we know about the far right Sanseito party? Spawned online in COVID and expected to dramatically increase its seats in parliament on the back of its Japanese first or Japanese people first campaign. It's been likened to Germany's AFD and Reform UK, hasn't it?
Donna Weeks: Yes, it has. And it is that type of party that, you know, we're seeing this across the world at the moment. There's a kind of a nationalist tendency to blame foreigners immigration. Sanseito, as you say, has really run on this platform of Japanese people first, and they're really expressing it strongly in that sense. They've stayed away from, if I may say, the legacy media. Their popularity has certainly come through the use of social media in a very strong way. And I guess, you know, tourism here in Japan, the last couple of years, you have seen a great increase in the number of tourists coming to Japan. But there's also an increase in foreign workers in places where, as one analyst has just said, you know, you can walk into a convenience store and you'll have a foreigner behind the counter and things like that. Now, some people say, well, that's really good. It's helping the GDP. It's helping with our cost of living. And others, as we've seen with, say, parties like this in Australia, are saying, you know, they're foreigners taking our jobs. They're foreigners buying up our real estate. The commonalities with the issues that we're seeing in elections right around the world at the moment is really something I think worth following and something for us as professional political analysts, professional political players. I think we really have to start taking notice of these things and look at ways to work around this to find answers to these issues that obviously people have.
Andy Park: Donna Weeks is a specialist in Japanese politics and Professor Emeritus at Musashino University in Tokyo. I do appreciate your time. Thank you.
Donna Weeks: Thank you, Andy.
