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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
“Landslide” has been used extensively to describe Sanae Takaichi’s record-breaking victory in Sunday’s election: a triumph that positions her atop a whopping supermajority in the powerful lower house of parliament.
But the description misses the real geology here. Landslides happen in the topsoil; the election did something to the bedrock beneath.
Much has been said about the crushing scale of Takaichi’s mandate, giving the lower house the ability to override the upper house if it chooses. Less has been said about the distance Japan has moved to produce it and what it really means. Everyone from Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and other foreign leaders to global fund managers, small-shop owners, military recruiters and the now swollen ranks of her own Liberal Democratic Party will shortly find out, in practical terms, how Takaichi’s unprecedented power to speak for a nation and to legislate with conviction will affect them.
But focusing on the immediate consequences of the mandate risks missing the big picture. Despite Takaichi’s profound grip on policy, and her detailed manifesto, she campaigned in broad terms. There was something for everyone. Some will have believed they were voting for a cut in the cost of food; some for reflationary stimulus; some for tax reform; some for constitutional reform. Policy specifics were not in the mandate. Nor, despite a lot of signalling on immigration, living costs and austerity, was this an angry rejection of the status quo. A party that has been in power for most of the past 70 years won the day. And nor, though Takaichi is charismatic, was the public handing her a shallow reward for more charisma in politics.
Japan, arguably, has given Takaichi a mandate for realism. The sort of realism that Japanese companies and Japanese households have built their lives around, but which the political sphere has often chosen to downplay. This was a vote for a politician to take the country as it is and have a shot at making it what it could be, rather than, as so many before her, taking Japan as it would like to be and then stumbling over reality. For a country now encouraged to believe in its strengths, that is potentially very liberating.
Takaichi invited voters to embrace realism, both the painful sort (Japan has underinvested in itself) and the inspiring (Japan is far more productive than it looks). Japan has its problems (demographics, aggressive competitors), but also possesses the means to fix them (ingenuity, technological flair). It may or may not work out, but this was an act of courage by both Takaichi and her voters.
The huge onus of this mandate is, unambiguously, on the prime minister. She won this almighty victory, not the LDP, and its legislators owe her their collective power. If the mandate is indeed for realism, she must now deliver just that. However tempting it was to make a bogeyman of foreigners during the campaign, for example, realism dictates that corporate Japan cannot long survive without imported labour.
Crucially, voters did not just grant a mandate for realism about Japan, but also about the world it now inhabits, shedding the logic of pacifism and the old habit of its leaders trading idealism for pragmatism. Japan sits in a uniquely perilous — but opportunity-rich — position between Trump’s US and Xi’s China. Voters appear to have run out of patience with the long-standing pretence that this is not so.
When Trump imposed tariffs on its closest ally in Asia, then forced it to commit titanic sums to have them reduced, the jolt shook Japan into a reality it has wished away for years. When Takaichi’s comments on a hypothetical Chinese invasion of Taiwan and its inevitable threat to Japan enraged Beijing, the Japanese sided squarely with the realism their prime minister found so hard to avoid.
The power of Takaichi’s mandate lies not just in voters’ acknowledgment of how rapidly and threateningly the global order is changing, but how quickly and overwhelmingly they have entrusted her with the task of adapting to it. Few other democracies have been quite so efficient.
Takaichi’s election gamble was not just that she could resurrect the LDP’s fortunes and win back control of parliament. It was that Japan was ready to accept three major changes at once.
In a short span of time, the country has lost the certainties of the postwar global order and the predictability of the post-cold war strategic alliance. At the same time, Takaichi wants Japan to redefine itself economically — and declare it is now definitively done with its mopey, risk-averse, cash-hoarding, self-doubting post-bubble era.
Such a transformation requires Japan to walk taller than it has in decades. Takaichi now has the mandate to make that happen.