Upper house vote in Japan: Kremlin-aided shift to the right?
The coalition government of Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba has lost its majority in the House of Councillors, the upper house of the National Diet. His Liberal Democratic Party has had a majority in the house almost without interruption for 70 years. Now for the first time it is in the minority in both chambers. Meanwhile two right-wing populist parties have gained ground. The press focuses on Sanseitō, which went from two to fourteen seats.
Following the global trend
The rise of a right-wing populist party in Japan is in keeping with developments around the world, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung points out:
“In many old industrialised countries, political movements that oppose globalisation and want their country's politics to focus on their own citizens are becoming increasingly popular. Sanseitō explicitly models itself on Trump, the AfD and Reform UK, showing that this is not just a local 'protest' in an already conservative society. It's part of the global trend towards national, and often even nationalist, politics.”
Signs of Moscow interference
Ilta-Sanomat sees Japan's stability at risk:
“In Japan, there are suspicions that the success of the Sanseitō party is at least partly due to Russian state propaganda. Experts have warned that Vladimir Putin's government is now able to use artificial intelligence to make its propaganda messages more effective, also in Japanese. ... It's thought that one of Russia's goals is to disrupt Japan's political elite and society in order to end the country's rapprochement with Nato and its support for Ukraine. ... Finland had hoped that Japan would act as a balancing factor amid the current global political upheaval. But the rise of the Sanseitō party now points to turbulence in Japan.”
Not pro-Russian, just different
The right-wing Sanseitō party isn't really pro-Russian, explains Japan expert Vladimir Nelidov in the pro-Kremlin paper Izvestia:
“Cautious statements by Sanseitō that the causes of the Ukraine conflict include Nato expansion and the dispute over the rights of the Russian population in eastern Ukraine have sufficed to draw accusations of it having 'ties to Moscow'. ... We shouldn't be entertain any high hopes that new political forces like Sanseitō will take power. Firstly, their social base is quite limited. ... Secondly, for Sanseitō, the stance on Russia is not a key issue but rather one of the points with which it tries to criticise the established consensus in Japanese politics. Japan is a country of continuity and tradition.”