Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae has just scored an unprecedented victory in the country’s general election. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which she leads, won 316 seats in the 465-member House of Representatives (the Diet’s lower house), up sharply from 198. The combined strength of two parties that had merged hastily – despite their fundamentally opposing platforms – in an effort to bring Takaichi down fell from 167 seats to just 49. The LDP, which celebrated its 70th anniversary last year, has never looked more robust.
Only moments after Takaichi became the LDP’s president last October, the party’s coalition partner of a quarter-century, Komeito, abruptly defected. With that, there was no guarantee that she could secure a majority in the lower house to become prime minister. Then, after she dissolved the chamber and called a general election in order to obtain a stronger mandate, Komeito, backed by disciplined religious voters, quickly merged with the largest opposition force, the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan.
Takaichi survived the first shock by forming a new coalition with a smaller party closer to her own policy line. She crushed the second challenge by setting the period for election campaigning to an unprecedentedly brief 16 days, leaving the new opposition alliance scant time to build name recognition.
The prime minister is herself something of a newcomer, having risen to the party presidency in a political culture that long assumed that a politician, and certainly a national leader, must be male. Rather than relying on the usual social circles that fostered the careers of her senior colleagues, she nurtured her ambitions on her own.
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