Japan is set to have its first female prime minister after Sanae Takaichi was voted in as leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) – a win that should see her appointed as the nation’s new leader in the middle of the month.
Takaichi, a right-wing politician who expressed admiration for Margaret Thatcher in her attempt to create a “strong and wealthy” Japan on the world scene, defeated her centrist challenger, Shinjiro Koizumi, in a runoff election in the LDP headquarters in Tokyo on Saturday.
The party president election followed when outgoing prime minister Shigeru Ishiba declared his resignation after a year in office. Ishiba, who is a moderate and whose election to the party presidency last year infuriated the right wing of his party, declared that the time had come to identify a replacement to captain a “new LDP”.
Takaichi, 64, takes over a party that has suffered two brutal elections in the last year as voters punished it for a funding scandal and its inability to cope with the cost-of-living crisis.
“Along with so many of you, we have carved out a new era for the LDP,” Takaichi said shortly after ousting Koizumi by 185 votes to 156. “Instead of being happy right now, I think there are real challenges ahead. I am sure that there is a mountain of work we need to do together.”.
“We must all pull together across all generations and work as one to rebuild the LDP. Everyone will have to work like a horse.”
As anticipated, Takaichi topped the first round of voting with 183 of 589 votes, followed closely by Koizumi on 164 votes. Three others were eliminated from the race. The runoff, where MPs’ votes carried more weight than those of ordinary party members, theoretically had Koizumi in its favour since he was reputed to be more popular among legislators. But it was Takaichi who came out on top after the second, final round of voting.
While the LDP coalition is no longer in parliament with a majority of seats, Takaichi is expected overwhelmingly to be confirmed as prime minister when she is voted on by MPs, with 15 October emerging as the probable date.
For her not to become prime minister, the opposition parties would need to come together in support of their own candidate – something observers say is impossible.
Her first task will be to rally her party and regain public support following over a year of scandal and election setbacks.
She will also need to counter public anxiety regarding immigration and mass tourism, and attempt to appeal to young voters who flocked to populist small parties like Sanseito in this summer’s upper house elections. Japan must “re-examine policies that admit people with totally different cultures and backgrounds”, Takaichi said on the campaign trail.
It is impossible to understate the symbolism of Takaichi’s victory in a country that has few female politicians and business leaders, and consistently ranks poorly in global gender gap comparisons. She has, though, opposed policies that many voters believe would advance the cause of gender equality, such as allowing women to become reigning empresses and married couples to use separate surnames.
Saturday’s election had been billed by pundits as a fight for the fate of the LDP, which has ruled Japan nearly consecutively for the last seven decades. Its electoral reign has been severely undermined, however, by a chronic scandal surrounding dozens of MPs who were discovered to have diverted unreported profits from the sale of tickets to party events into slush funds.
Foreign policy hawk Takaichi will also be confronted with an unstable security landscape in East Asia, with the strengthening of a loose anti-Western bloc that includes China, Russia, and North Korea, as well as the reconfiguring of economic relationships with the US under Donald Trump, who is said to visit Japan later this month.
All 295 of the LDP’s lawmakers cast ballots in the first round of Saturday’s vote, with the same number of votes allocated based on the wishes of slightly more than 1 million grassroots members who had already voted.
Following no overall majority being achieved by any of the candidates in the first round, Takaichi faced off against Koizumi, each of the 295 lawmakers in the LDP receiving one vote, and the membership share falling to 47 votes, one for each of Japan’s prefectures.
