When candidates for the leadership of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic party (LDP) were invited during a debate to say a few words in English, Sanae Takaichi kept her contribution brief. “Japan is back,” she declared. But her victory on Saturday also signals the arrival of different Japan: eight decades after the end of the second world war, the country is about to get its first female prime minister.
The 64-year-old rightwinger, who has cited Margaret Thatcher in her quest to build a “strong and prosperous” Japan, beat her centrist rival, Shinjiro Koizumi, in a runoff election at the LDP headquarters in Tokyo.
Unlike many of her recent predecessors, Takaichi is not assured of the prime minister’s job when parliament meets on 15 October. The LDP and its junior coalition partner, Komeito, have lost their majorities in both houses of the Diet in the past year and will have to rely on opposition votes for Takaichi to be approved – although observers believe that is all but assured.
The result is redemption for Takaichi, who last year ran unsuccessfully against the outgoing prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba. Her campaign for the leadership faltered this week after criticism of her unsubstantiated claims, made during a debate, that foreigners were physically abusing “sacred” deer in Nara, where she has been an MP since 1993.
Takaichi’s win represents a victory for the right of the LDP, which has spent the past year licking its wounds under the more moderate Ishiba.
She has a direct ideological connection with the former prime minister Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated in 2022, sharing his revisionist views on Japan’s wartime conduct – a position that could cause friction with Japan’s neighbours.
Takaichi has been critical of China and makes regular pilgrimages to Yasukuni, a shrine in Tokyo that honours Japan’s war dead, including convicted war criminals. She has displayed similarly conservative credentials on social policy: she opposes same-sex marriage and allowing married couples to use separate surnames – a move popular with voters that she says would undermine traditional family values. She is similarly dismissive of the idea of reigning empresses.
Abe also looms large in her economic policy. Takaichi has said she supports aggressive public spending to stimulate the world’s fourth-biggest economy, and has raised the possibility of renegotiating a trade and investment deal with the US in which Donald Trump agreed to lower tariffs on Japanese autos and other items in return for $550bn in Japanese investment.
Her focus on migration – a subject that occupied the first eight minutes of a 15-minute campaign speech – is seen as an attempt to win back voters who abandoned the LDP in national elections last October and this July in favour of rightwing minor parties, including the up-and-coming Sanseito.
During her campaign Takaichi called for restrictions on non-Japanese buying property and a crackdown on illegal immigration – a view shared by her four opponents.
A fan of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team, Takaichi played drums in a heavy metal band while at university and counts scuba diving and watching martial arts among her hobbies.
