Japan’s politics is entering a messy new era

THE DEBUT on TikTok by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Japan’s long-time ruling party, lacked what young people might call “rizz”. Released last month, the 44-second video features Ishiba Shigeru, the 68-year-old prime minister, in a dark suit promising to lower petrol prices, while glancing down at paper notes. Prepare to be astounded: it was not a success.

The LDP’s grudging embrace of TikTok highlights a striking change: Japanese politics are moving into a messy new era. The long-dominant LDP faces many threats, with big implications for the country’s future. Upper House elections taking place on July 20th are the next test of how well the party is adjusting to this new era. In a sign that the outside world is already recalibrating, on July 14th long-term government bonds sold off sharply due in part to worries about the direction of fiscal policy.

The LDP has commanded the country’s political system since its founding in 1955. For more than a decade, beginning in 2012, it enjoyed frequent supermajorities in parliament together with its much smaller coalition partner, Komeito. Recently the party’s members have been growing more quarrelsome. Its rivals, meanwhile, are getting more numerous, and more dynamic. And ever more Japanese are finding their news on social media.

The LDP was born from the merger of two conservative parties, the Liberal Party and the Japan Democratic Party. A big-tent approach to policy, a favourable electoral system and plenty of pork helped the party rule uninterrupted for decades. It lost power briefly in 1993 to a multi-party coalition and again in 2009 to the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). But the DPJ struggled to govern and happened to be in office during the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster that struck northern Japan in 2011. Many Japanese came to associate opposition-party rule with crisis. Abe Shinzo brought the LDP back to power in 2012.

Yet much has changed for the party since Abe’s assassination in 2022. A scandal over political fundraising in 2023-24 alienated voters and led to the dissolution of many of the party’s formal factions, which had functioned as parties within the party and oversaw much of the fundraising in question. Without these structures to channel and manage disagreements over policy, the LDP has become more fractious. At elections last October the LDP and Komeito failed to secure a majority in the Lower House, leaving the LDP leading a minority government for the first time in its history. The LDP’s majority in the Upper House is also at risk in the upcoming elections (see chart).

The country’s weaker chamber does not have any direct say over who sits in the cabinet. But Upper House results can help decide a prime minister’s fate. That is especially true for Mr Ishiba, a longtime gadfly who won the internal leadership contest last autumn but then presided over the loss of the party’s majority in the Lower House. With 125 (of 248) seats being contested, the LDP and Komeito will need to win at least 50 to maintain their majority (they currently hold 66 of those seats). Anything less and calls for Mr Ishiba’s resignation will mount.

Party members are starting to sound fatalistic about what the coming years will bring. “Maybe people are just getting tired of the LDP itself,” one of its bigwigs reflects. The party has been making efforts to appear more energetic. During last year’s Lower House campaign, its slogan was “Protect Japan”; for the Upper House ballot, it has switched to “Move Japan”. Yet it has still not stated very precisely where it would like the country to go.

Newer, smaller parties are offering clearer messages, even if their ideas are often impractical. Several outfits now threaten the LDP from the right. The Do-it-Yourself Party (Sanseito), a five-year-old far-right populist party, has made inroads with an anti-immigrant “Japanese First” message. The Japan Innovation Party (Ishin) has built up a strong base around Osaka, Japan’s second city. There are left-wing upstarts, too. Reiwa Shinsengumi, a six-year-old populist party, is trying to steal voters from the staid Japanese Communist Party and the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP), the centre-left successor to the DPJ. It promises, among other things, to abolish the consumption tax.

The most successful small party is the Democratic Party for the People (DPFP). It combines technocratic centrism with populist flair. It appeals to voters from both sides of the political spectrum. The party quadrupled its seats in the Lower House last October, to 28. The LDP, which has 196 seats, has been forced to co-operate with it to pass many bills. Tamaki Yuichiro, its leader, hopes his party will one day prop up a coalition government; he wants to use that leverage to become prime minister. He is laser-focused on winning over younger and working-age Japanese. He has offered giveaways intended to increase their take-home pay. The party leads the LDP among under-40 voters in one recent poll.

These challengers are all making better use of new media. Until lately social media’s influence on politics had been growing more slowly in Japan than in other rich countries, perhaps because voters there are older. Yet now the revolution looks well under way. Nearly 75% of Japanese over 70 say they trust NHK, the national broadcaster. Fewer than 40% of 20-somethings do. Mr Tamaki and other upstarts are doing better on the sites that younger people flock to. The DPFP boasts nearly twice as many YouTube subscribers as the ruling party.

People think the LDP are “old-fashioned, traditional, out of touch with new trends”, laments one of its younger members. The party’s greying leaders are more at ease in the smoke-filled backrooms of Tokyo’s ryotei (clubby traditional restaurants) than on the algorithmic byways of the internet. “It’s a big threat for the LDP, and the leadership doesn’t realise the size of the threat they are facing,” says Hosoya Yuichi of Keio University in Tokyo. A month after it launched, the LDP’s TikTok channel had fewer than 3,000 followers.

Though the LDP is certainly down, it is clearly a long way from out. Its members include talented young politicians waiting for a chance to shine, notes Toshikawa Takao of Insideline, a newsletter. If the party can make one of them prime minister, that might do wonders for its brand. Compared with any of its challengers, the LDP has stronger local networks, deeper pockets and closer ties with the country’s powerful bureaucracy. The LDP’s support has fallen from above 40% in 2022 to below 30% now. But none of its rivals cracks 10%.

More competitive and more vibrant politics could be just the tonic Japan needs. Minority government may be very unusual in post-war Japan, but it is not so rare in other parliamentary democracies. The current experience of it in Japan could help make parties more responsive to what ordinary Japanese want.

But that is only one possibility, and there is another scenario: that the coming years bring Japan a succession of unstable coalitions and short-lived prime ministers, and that policymaking suffers as a result. With challengers pledging to cut taxes, the LDP has promised voters cash handouts; the prospect of such profligacy has already fuelled concerns about Japan’s fiscal health, leading to the recent bond-market turmoil. Weak governments will struggle to make hard decisions about how to fund proposed increases to defence spending. Negotiating budgets as a minority government is “crazy”, the LDP bigwig sighs. It could get madder and messier still. ■