Articles

The Fault Lines Beneath Japan’s Conservative Landslide, by Andrea Ferrario – 20 February 2026

The LDP wins two-thirds of the lower house, but behind Takaichi’s triumph lie limited real support, falling wages, and an open geopolitical contest with Beijing and Seoul

In the February 8 election for Japan’s lower house, Sanae Takaichi achieved a result unprecedented in the history of the Liberal Democratic Party. The LDP won 316 of the 465 seats, the first time since 1955 that a single party surpassed the two-thirds threshold. Together with its coalition partner, the Japan Innovation Party (Nippon Ishin no Kai, 36 seats), the governing bloc reaches 352 seats—enough to override the upper house, where the LDP remains in the minority.

The opposition emerged from the vote in ruins. The Centrist Alliance for Reform, an electoral cartel formed in January from the merger of the Constitutional Democratic Party and Komeito, collapsed from 167 seats to 49—the worst result for a main opposition party in the entire postwar period. Its co-leader Yoshihiko Noda, a former prime minister who had staked his political career on the project, announced his resignation. The parliamentary left suffered an even sharper collapse: the Communist Party was halved from eight seats to four, Reiwa Shinsengumi fell from eight to a single seat, and the Social Democratic Party was wiped out.

Much has already been written in Japan and abroad about Takaichi’s personal success, her political trajectory, and the implications for Japanese rearmament and constitutional revision. It is worth dwelling instead on the more contradictory aspects that this vote has brought to light—elements that the narrative of a “landslide victory” tends to leave in the shadows.

Support less solid than it appears

Voter turnout was 56.26%, slightly higher than the historic low of 2024 but still the fifth lowest in the postwar era. The figure takes on a different meaning when considered alongside the actual vote totals. In the proportional segment, the LDP received about 21 million votes, equal to 36% of voters. Measured against all eligible voters, this means that fewer than one in five Japanese actually wrote “LDP” on their ballot. More than 60% of those who went to the polls chose another party. The disproportion between this figure and the 316 seats won is explained by the mechanics of Japan’s single-member first-past-the-post districts, where the winner takes all and votes cast for losing candidates are effectively discarded. In these districts, according to data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the LDP won 49.1% of the vote but captured 85.8% of the seats—a gap of nearly 37 percentage points, the second largest since the system was introduced in 1996. The mirror image affected the Centrist Alliance, which with 21.6% of the vote ended up with just 2.4% of the seats. Takaichi is popular, and her direct communication style has attracted cross-cutting support, especially among younger voters. The “landslide,” however, is above all an amplification effect of the electoral system.

If the seat count suggests an image of unchallenged dominance, the picture that emerges when we look at the results of the smaller parties is more complex. Sanseito, the far-right party led by Sohei Kamiya, rose from two seats to fifteen, all via proportional representation. It is a significant increase, but one that must be measured against the party’s declared goal of thirty seats and its hope of breaking through in single-member districts—where it remained at zero. During the campaign, its new slogan generated only half the social-media attention it had received in the 2025 upper-house elections. The reason is simple: Takaichi absorbed back into the LDP much of the conservative electorate that had drifted away from the party, and her viral videos siphoned off the very media oxygen on which Sanseito had built its support. Kamiya himself acknowledged the phenomenon.

The most striking novelty—almost unknown outside Japan—is Team Mirai (“Team Future”), a party founded in May 2025 by artificial-intelligence engineer Takahiro Anno. Without holding any seats before the election, it won 11 proportional seats, more than double its target of five. What distinguishes it in the Japanese landscape is a contrarian stance on the fiscal issue that dominated the campaign. While every party—from the LDP to the far left—competed in promising cuts to the consumption tax, Anno argued that the priority should be reducing social insurance contributions, which are more regressive and more burdensome for low-income workers. He warned that stimulating demand through tax cuts risked fueling inflation further. This heterodox position clearly resonated with a segment of voters skeptical of bipartisan fiscal populism. On labor policy, Team Mirai proposes welcoming highly skilled foreign workers while restricting the entry of low-skilled labor, arguing that artificial intelligence will be able to replace it. Beyond its technocratic language, the position conveys a hostility toward immigration not very different from that of other parties.

The collapse of the parliamentary left deserves an interpretation that goes beyond the seat count. The combined proportional vote of the Communist Party, Reiwa Shinsengumi, and the Social Democrats fell below five million, dropping beneath a seven-to-eight-million threshold for the first time in years—a level that had long held partly thanks to the compensating effect of Reiwa’s rise offsetting the decline of the other two. Even within Japan’s radical left, post-election analyses candidly acknowledge that their arguments have become invisible to generations under thirty, and that the rhetoric claiming that strengthening defense “leads to war” has lost resonance with an electorate that daily witnesses Chinese pressure, the war in Ukraine, and the unpredictability of U.S. policy.

Inflation that erodes without enriching

Much of Takaichi’s support has been built on a promise to revive an economy that, after more than three decades of deflationary stagnation, has finally rediscovered inflation—only to discover that rising prices do not automatically bring prosperity. Japanese real wages fell in all twelve months of 2025, marking the fourth consecutive year of decline. The average nominal wage rose by 2.3%, but the consumer price index climbed by 3.7%, wiping out the increase and leaving workers worse off than the previous year. The price of rice, the staple of the Japanese diet, rose by more than 60%, and food purchases now absorb a record share of household spending, squeezing everything else.

Yet the most revealing indicator is not cyclical. A comparative survey of workers in five advanced economies found that only 4% of Japanese respondents expect their real wages to improve, compared with about 13% in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany. Seventy-eight percent of Japanese expect them to worsen further. This pessimism cannot be explained by the current economic moment alone. It is rooted in three decades of wage stagnation that have embedded a deep expectation that wages simply will never grow.

Against this backdrop of daily erosion in purchasing power, Japan’s GDP grew just 0.1% in the fourth quarter of 2025—well below forecasts and following a 0.7% contraction in the previous quarter. Exports are declining, consumer spending is nearly stagnant, and corporate investment remains timid. Takaichi’s response is an aggressive public-spending program: a record budget of ¥122.3 trillion and a promise to suspend the consumption tax on food for two years. Her belief is that only a strong injection of public resources can restart the virtuous cycle of growth and wages. Financial markets have celebrated, with the Nikkei 225 reaching historic highs. But public debt has climbed to ¥1,342 trillion—the highest ever—and projections from the Ministry of Finance indicate that by 2029 debt servicing will absorb 30% of the national budget, ten points more than today. Takaichi’s wager is that growth generated by spending will offset the cost of the debt. Skeptics note that the “trickle-down” recipe—the idea that wealth generated at the top will eventually flow downward—has not worked in any country where it has been tried.

A signal from the corporate world further complicates the picture. A growing number of profitable large Japanese companies are turning to early-retirement programs and job cuts. Mitsubishi Electric, expecting record net profits, offered early retirement to employees over 53, and about 2,400 accepted. Panasonic and Olympus, both profitable, are preparing to cut thousands of jobs. Among publicly listed companies that launched similar programs in the past year, about 70% were profitable. The stated aim is to renew the workforce to face the digital transition, but the implicit message is that the Japanese model of lifetime employment—already eroded by the widespread use of precarious work—is crumbling even in its traditional strongholds.

An aging and inward-turning society

Economic tensions are intertwined with a demographic and social transformation that is reshaping the country itself. Japan has been losing population since 2010, when it had 128 million residents compared with today’s 123 million. Elderly people outnumbered children already in 1995. Today the country has nine million empty homes—14% of the total housing stock—concentrated mainly in rural areas where entire villages are emptying as young people migrate to cities and no one inherits their parents’ houses. Many schools are closing for lack of students.

The labor market suffers from a structural contradiction. In 2025 the workforce reached 70 million people, a record driven by rising participation among women and the elderly. But hours worked continue to decline, partly because many workers—especially dependent spouses—reduce their working time to avoid exceeding thresholds that would trigger social-insurance contributions. Hourly productivity in sectors such as restaurants and transportation is steadily declining and remains far below U.S. levels. This is compounded by a corporate culture that continues to penalize anyone—man or woman—who tries to balance work and family life. Takaichi herself, during her inauguration, declared that she wanted to “throw away the expression work–life balance,” a phrase that in a country marked by the trauma of karoshi—death from overwork—provoked mixed reactions.

Social unease also feeds distrust toward foreigners, a phenomenon in Japan with more complex roots than the simple label of political xenophobia suggests. Sociological surveys show that distrust of foreign residents grows especially among those who have little direct contact with them, in contexts where questions about who they are, what they do, and how long they intend to stay remain unanswered and turn into anxieties amplified by social media. Online circulation of distorted news and unverified claims about alleged crimes by foreigners creates a spiral in which fears reinforce one another. Conversely, in areas where daily coexistence with foreign workers has been established for years, the phenomenon is far less pronounced. It is a dynamic that politics exploits by raising abstract alarms about people who are unknown—at a time when Japan has reached a record 2.5 million foreign workers, and the government itself expects more than 1.2 million additional workers by 2029 to fill labor shortages across many sectors.

Beijing, Seoul, and the real geopolitical contests

Japan’s internal tensions—from wage erosion to demographic crisis to the reshaping of the political landscape—do not develop in a geopolitical vacuum. The archipelago sits at the center of a system of regional tensions that profoundly shape its choices, and the February 8 election partly reflected this reality. Among Tokyo’s international relationships, those with its two major neighbors—China and South Korea—deserve special attention, because it is there that the most complex contests for post-election Japan will be played out.

Takaichi’s statement on November 7 last year—when she told parliament that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan and open the way to defensive military intervention alongside the United States—triggered a spiral of retaliation from Beijing. China blocked imports of Japanese seafood, discouraged group tourism, and imposed restrictions on exports of critical minerals. The strategy, however, proved spectacularly counterproductive. Chinese pressure acted as a propellant for Takaichi’s support, reinforcing her image as a leader who does not retreat in the face of intimidation. Even in areas expected to suffer economically from the decline in Chinese tourists, the prime minister’s popularity held firm. Japanese parties that historically maintained more conciliatory positions toward Beijing—such as the Centrist Alliance—were devastated in the election. For the first time since 1996, the LDP won all four districts in Okinawa, traditionally an opposition stronghold, precisely as China was questioning the status of the islands.

Buoyed by this mandate, Takaichi quickly translated victory into policy. In her first parliamentary speech after the vote, on February 20, she denounced Chinese “coercion” in the East and South China Seas, announced a revision of Japan’s three key security strategy documents within the year, and proposed the creation of a national intelligence council under her direct presidency. She also anticipated the creation of a committee to screen foreign investments in sensitive sectors, modeled on the U.S. CFIUS. On the same day, the LDP introduced a proposal to remove restrictions limiting military exports to non-lethal equipment, opening the door to the overseas sale of the entire catalog of Japan’s defense industry. The speed with which these measures were placed on the table suggests that the agenda had long been prepared and was simply awaiting electoral legitimacy.

It is now evident that Beijing’s strategy backfired. Less obvious are the reasons why Chinese leadership could miscalculate so badly. Over the past quarter century, the number of Chinese officials and researchers specializing in Japanese affairs has sharply declined. China’s rapid economic growth—surpassing Japan as the world’s second-largest economy in 2010—produced a systematic underestimation of Tokyo. In addition, public analysis of Japanese election results in China is constrained by censorship, and commentators tend to write what they believe the government wants to hear rather than offering realistic assessments. A similar mistake was made with Taiwan, where Chinese military pressure paradoxically helped keep the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party in power for three consecutive terms.

Yet the dynamic is more insidious than a simple miscalculation. Nationalist sectors of Chinese public opinion and the state apparatus welcomed Takaichi’s victory almost with satisfaction, seeing it as definitive proof that Japan has chosen confrontation and that the return of Japanese militarism is now a reality. Within this framework, any future friction between the two countries ceases to be a political dispute and is reinterpreted as historical continuity, allowing any muscular Chinese response to be presented as a “legitimate reckoning.” Takaichi’s bet is that the irreversibility of her position will ultimately force China toward pragmatism. The risk is the opposite: the stronger her mandate, the less China’s leadership can afford to appear conciliatory without paying a domestic political price. The combination of historical memory of Japanese aggression and the perception of Japan as a declining power creates a particularly volatile mixture, in which contempt for the adversary reduces respect for the consequences of a possible clash.

In this more uncertain and tense environment, Takaichi nevertheless appears to be attempting a familiar script. The diplomatic trajectory she seems to envision recalls that of her mentor Shinzo Abe. In 2013 Abe visited the Yasukuni Shrine—where war criminals are also commemorated—and then spent nearly two years rebuilding conditions for a summit with Xi Jinping on the sidelines of APEC in 2014. The logic was that Xi eventually accepted dialogue with a leader who had proven stable and durable. Takaichi has spoken of “creating the right conditions” for a visit to Yasukuni, and the APEC summit scheduled in Shenzhen in November 2026 could become the moment for recalibration—if timing allows. A shrine visit in October, one month before the meeting, would represent the worst possible diplomatic alignment. For now, Beijing remains in a waiting posture, ahead of the March 19 Takaichi–Trump summit and the Xi–Trump meeting expected in April. Before recalibrating its approach to Tokyo, China wants to see what kind of understanding emerges between Washington and Beijing and how much room for maneuver remains.

Relations with South Korea add another layer of complexity to the regional picture. In a context that could easily have deteriorated, South Korean president Lee Jae-myung and Takaichi have developed a surprisingly functional relationship, with three bilateral meetings in the first three months of government and the launch of “shuttle diplomacy” between the two capitals. The January summit in Nara, Takaichi’s electoral district, ended with a session where the two leaders played drums together—an image that went viral across Asian social media. The reasons for this rapprochement are strategic rather than sentimental. Both Tokyo and Seoul face the combined pressures of U.S. tariffs, the North Korean nuclear threat, and an increasingly unstable regional environment, and neither can afford to alienate the other.

Yet the underlying tension has not disappeared. The intensifying confrontation between China and Japan puts Seoul in a delicate position, as South Korea seeks simultaneously to strengthen ties with Tokyo while keeping channels open with Beijing. Two immediate tests will measure the resilience of this understanding: Takeshima Day on February 22, commemorating the disputed islands controlled by South Korea (Dokdo), and any potential visit by Takaichi to Yasukuni. The unresolved history of Japanese colonialism in Korea—especially the wounds surrounding forced labor and the so-called “comfort women”—remains the seismic fault beneath the bilateral relationship. The paradox is that Chinese pressure, rather than dividing Tokyo and Seoul, appears to be pushing them toward cooperation—for now. But the balance is fragile, and a single symbolic gesture taken too far could put it back into question.

Andrea Ferrario is an Italian international politics blogger with a focus on East Asia. He has collaborated with the weekly magazine Internazionale and is co-editor of the website Crisi Globale.

The Italian original of this article was first published on the author’s Substack. This English translation was first published on the Left Renewal Blog.

, , , ,
Views: 19
More content from this blog
, , , ,