Japan has just voted — and the results aren’t pretty for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Now holding just 122 seats in the upper house, three short of a majority, the LDP and its coalition partner, Komeito, have lost control of both wings of the National Diet for the first time since the party’s foundation in 1955.
For Shigeru Ishiba, the incumbent Prime Minister, this is clearly a humiliation. In truth, though, the world’s media seem most interested in another politician. With his sharp tongue and provocative charisma, Sohei Kamiya is already being likened to a Japanese Trump. Certainly, his Sanseito party’s “Japanese First” slogan is clearly based on the MAGA rallying cry of “America First”, even as Kamiya’s anti-immigrant sentiment echoes populists from Italy to Ireland.
As a result, Kamiya’s star is rising, with some pre-election polls placing his populists in third place, the party ultimately won just 14 seats. That’s an impressive victory for sure. But Sanseito is just one piece of the opposition pie, one encompassing several parties and 112 other seats. That includes everyone from the centre-right Democratic Party to the Communists, each against the LDP — but each with very different ideas on Japan’s future.
“Do you have no party to vote for? Then we were born for you.” That is the tagline on Sanseito’s English language website — a howl of rage against Japan’s political establishment. Believing that the establishment Liberal Democratic Party is both politically ineffective and insufficiently conservative, it’s rooted in traditional values like family and national pride.
This is particularly evident in Sanseito’s anti-immigration rhetoric, with Kamiya alleging that foreigners are being prioritised for welfare benefits, despite providing little evidence to support his claim. Yet just like the Farages of the world, who often tone down their words after some time has passed, Kamiya later admitted that Sanseito “has never called to drive out foreigners” and that “Japanese First” was less an actual policy than a nifty campaign slogan.
Besides, Sanseito’s rise among a subset of Japanese voters comes not because Kamiya’s ideas are popular — but because he’s been able to attract an electorate desperate for alternatives to the LDP. Prime Minister Ishiba, though hailing from the same party, is a completely different leader to the more domestically popular and internationally respected Shinzo Abe. Shockingly assassinated in 2022, the late Abe was certainly divisive. Yet he carried a sense of focused leadership that the current administration simply lacks.
The LDP’s current predicament is a mess of its own making. A slush fund scandal has rocked the party over the last few years, raising questions around the role of money in Japanese politics. It’s unclear what part Abe himself played in these events, but the dead are mercifully silent. Still, it was Abe’s political faction that was directly incriminated in the scandal, and it is now completely disbanded.
Prime Ministers Yoshihide Suga and Fumio Kishida both failed to regain public confidence in the LDP. Kishida attempted to address the scandal by sacking officials and dissolving his own implicated faction, but the public was not satisfied. The result was Kishida’s resignation, the end of LDP-Komeito’s majority in Japan’s lower house, with the ruling coalition now losing their hold of the Diet.
As a political outsider unrelated to the scandal, at any rate, the hapless Ishiba has inherited a Japan tired of LDP failure. Even so, it’d be wrong to see Kamiya as the Trump to Ishiba’s Hillary. For if Japanese populism may initially seem analogous to its Western counterparts, this is an entirely different political landscape. Sanseito’s pie-in-the-sky proposals — notably providing 100,000 yen (about $690) to families for every child they have — are closer to Corbynite social welfare. Kamiya’s push for AI and automation would be anathema to Rust Belt voters, but they make a bit more sense given Japan’s collapsing population.
“It’d be wrong to see Kamiya as the Trump to Ishiba’s Hillary.”
In fact, it’s because of Japan’s notoriously low birthrate — actually not that far off other first-world countries — that jobs are becoming hard to fill. Representing about 3% of the population, foreigners can today be found in low-paying jobs such as manual labour. Yet there still aren’t enough of them to “steal” jobs from anyone. There are certainly more foreigners in Japan now than 20 years ago, but the numbers pale compared to the mass-migration seen in Europe. Approximately 357,000 foreigners arrived in Japan last year, a sharp contrast to the 1.2 million who migrated to the UK over the same period.
Illegal immigration? It’s actually on the decline in Japan. There are about 70,000 illegal immigrants in Japan out of an overall population of 123 million. America, for its part, has roughly 11 million illegals versus a population of 347 million. Proportionally, then, Japan is nowhere near close. According to a 2025 report from the Right-leaning Sankei Shimbun newspaper, the number of illegal overstayers in Japan is significantly down from the 1993 high of around 290,000, fluctuating between 60,000 and 80,000 since then. Because Japan has a tighter lid on illegal immigration compared to Western countries, it should come as no surprise that more quotidian issues, like the cost of living crisis, were far bigger concerns.
Over recent months, social media has highlighted the bad behaviour stemming from overtourism, such as littering, noise pollution, and treating sacred Shinto sites like a playground. The government is doing its best to address these problems, but that’s little comfort for the locals who live nearby. It’s important to remember, however, that the troublemakers are tourists rather than immigrants. Studies suggest that crime rates among foreigners living in Japan are about the same, or even lower, than for the Japanese themselves.
What, then, comes next for Sanseito? To begin with, don’t count on the party being around forever. While their triumph this time was notable, grassroots political parties tend to have a short shelf life in Japan: due to infighting, scandals, and poor leadership. Most of Sanseito’s newly-elected candidates have little to no political experience, while their idealism will eventually rub up against other opposition parties and the LDP itself, which is still a force to be reckoned with.
Yet even if Sanseito eventually dissolves, the establishment cannot ignore the grievances of its voters. As the past decade has shown, populist movements thrive when the “left behind” rise up. What happened last week is only the start of the LDP losing its grip on power — if, anyway, it refuses to change course. Stagnant wages, rising inflation, a weak yen, and Ishiba’s failed tariff negotiations with Trump — all these have left voters frustrated.
If things continue to worsen, then, the LDP is likely to expel Ishiba and find an alternative. A new leader is no guarantee of success, but Shinzo Abe’s heir apparent Sanae Takaichi has stated her intention to run for the party’s leadership. Much of her worldview, from economics to foreign policy aligns with Abe’s, which would potentially allow her to steer the LDP back towards what allowed it to stay in power for so long. Like the late prime minister, Takaichi is a dedicated nationalist, and supports Abenomics stalwarts like fiscal stimulus. More controversially, she is also dedicated to pushing for constitutional reform which would greatly expand Japan’s military powers — something Abe himself ultimately failed to do.
Then again, the LDP still has a serious image problem, not least with the slush fund scandal fresh in the nation’s mind. Should the opposition form a coalition powerful enough to become the ruling bloc, we may see a repeat of 2010 to 2012, when the LDP was out of power. Despite this setback, it eventually returned under the rebranded leadership of Shinzo Abe. Sanseito, in short, may enjoy some influence for a time — but will need more than slogans to stay relevant.
