In Japan, Anti-Establishment Parties Resonate With Young Voters

Asia Pacific|In Japan, Anti-Establishment Parties Resonate With Young Voters

The surging popularity of new, right-wing political parties that handed Japan’s long-governing Liberal Democratic Party a humiliating election defeat is a sign of a growing generational gap, as younger voters embrace calls for lower taxes, restrictions on immigration and a break with the political status quo.

The defeat, which rendered the Liberal Democrats a minority in both houses of the Diet, the country’s Parliament, could herald the end of an era for the broad-tent conservative group that has been the country’s dominant political force for 70 years. But while the party has faced would-be usurpers before, this time was different, because the challengers came from the nationalist right, which the Liberal Democrats had long controlled.

The biggest winners on Sunday were two, far-right parties that did not exist five years ago. While Japan in the past has seen its share of flash-in-the-pan, anti-establishment upstarts, the Democratic Party of the People and the more extreme Sanseito party seemed to make much larger inroads among younger voters, who were drawn by their pledges to lift stagnant wages, reduce the number of foreign workers and break the grip that older generations of voters have held on politics.

The gains of the right-wing parties have led many in Japan to wonder if the global wave of right-wing anti-establishment political movements had finally reached their shores. After years of seeming insulated from outside political forces, many Japanese voters, particularly in its younger generations, finally have had enough of what they regard as a political order dominated by corporate and political vested interests and the legions of retirees