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‘Sana-mania’ grips Japan as ultra-conservative Takaichi expected to secure election landslide
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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She's absolutely not what Japan needed. Conservatives are less unhinged than their US counterparts but they wont do what's needed for Japan to survive. Their aging population voted for this as they get unreasonably spooked by immigration when their country needed it the most (Japan's immigration is already very low). They'll gradually fall into corruption and irrelevance in the next few decades if they don't wake up or worse if there's a war.
Part of the problem is that some of the LDP's base thought they weren't conservative enough and started voting for other parties, so the LDP decided to appeal to them. Of course, this is just short-term thinking to maintain power at all costs and is gonna fuck the country in the long-run unless they get their act together.
The majority of the Seats are FPTP, so it's a common trend to chase the crazies.
I think we need to blame voters less and systems more, all non-proportional system have a rightwards shift built in.
In theory this could work leftwardly but as these countries tend to depend heavily on capitalist media to tell voters who is capable of winning in their district, the leftward shift is usually described as unrealistic & impossible, whereas the right shift is usually exaggerated and considered a real threat to the center-right/center-left.
You see the same effect in the UK, US, Russia (when they had elections), etc.
Whereas Ireland, Scandanvia, tend to have stable liberal-to-progressive governments rather than flip between a center-left & center-right establishment party that is constantly chasing far right voters.
I think the best system to counteract this is STV (used in Ireland) as it:
Their demographics are crashing, young people are not having kids, or waiting until far later in life, and her solution, as far as I’ve heard, is “bitch you gotta max that grindset, 100h weeks are for closers”. Which is just leaning further into the already insane work culture of Japan.
They're going to kill themselves, MMW what remains of their young will try to move to other countries and they'll be over. It's just sad.
You don't know Japan.
Young voters absolutely love Sanae: https://archive.ph/IooOg
It's possible for both things to be true isn't it?
Your source mentions that she is popular with young people but that her party is not popular with young people. It also mentions that young people don't have a high voter turnout. With Japans aging population and the information in your link, that could still mean that she is popular with young people but the net effect from young voters is still tiny. I couldn't find any good sources for actually breaking down the demographics of her popularity though.
Also, why do a hit on run on someone trying to answer a question, and not take a shot at the question itself, or let people know why you didn't try to answer the question?
The earlier comment made it out to seem like it was just the older people who voted for her. Saying that young ones vote for her too is a good correction
Agreed. Depending on what portion of turn out though, I'm just not sure it necessarily fits behind the lead "you don't know Japan". And with that lead, it seemed like there was more to say about what Japan is actually like.
That said, they're likely Japanese with far better English skills than I have in Japanese and I'm possibly being overly harsh
Young voters in Japan are less informed than young voters in literally every other developed country.
I never said they don't, with time they'll realise they f'ed themselves.