A Virus That Afflicts the World – Sanae Takaichi, Trump, and the Quiet International of the Far Right

Japan’s political scene stands at a turning point – and at the same time before a mirror in which familiar contours from Washington, Rome, and Budapest are reflected. A governing party loses its majority, a long-standing coalition breaks apart, the new party leadership urgently seeks a partner who reliably delivers votes. That explains at first glance why Sanae Takaichi, aged 64, is poised in Tokyo to take over from Shigeru Ishiba on Tuesday. But beneath the surface of this parliamentary arithmetic another logic is at work, one that feels familiar in Washington, Rome, Budapest and Paris. One might call it the syndrome of the determined minority – a style of politics that presents conflict as virtue, revision as cure, identity as currency. A virus that knows no borders and afflicts the immune system of liberal democracies where it is weakest – in exhaustion, price pressure, mistrust, a weariness of complexity.

Takaichi’s rise is not an isolated event but another node in a network that stretches from Moscow to Miami, from Osaka to Oradea. The strands are not always institutional, often only symbolic, sometimes merely stylistic. But they are strong enough to shift political gravity. In Japan this fabric carries familiar features: the break with Komeito after 26 years, officially justified by corruption fatigue and unofficially driven by ideological hardening; the reach for Ishin no Kai, the right-nationalist Innovation Party from Osaka, as a bridge to power; the proclamation that security policy will be subordinated to a more resolute military doctrine and economic frustration cooled by short-term subsidies. It is the handbook of a project that draws its legitimacy from crisis and its energy from perpetual escalation.

The woman who has become a flag-carrier in a men’s party owes her career not to a feminist opening but to the consistent amplification of traditional order. The male succession to the throne as an untouchable principle, the rejection of same-sex marriage as a statement of conviction, the opposition to separate surnames as a cult of unity: these are not mere detail positions in fringe debates but building blocks of a political blueprint that imposes a clear hierarchical alignment on gender roles, family, nation and history. It is no coincidence that Takaichi understands revisionism not as provocation but as “restoration.” Visits to the Yasukuni Shrine or symbolic offerings there, positive talk about conservative lobbying circles calling for constitutional revision, and the demonstrative affinity to Shinzo Abe’s security agenda together form a coordinate system in which dissent is weakness and doubt decadence.

That this agenda is gaining ground in an economic squeeze is no Japanese special case. It is the grammar of the present. Rising prices and stagnating real wages, an aging society, a shrinking labor force, a diffuse fear of loss of control – all of that is the best soil for a politics that does not solve problems but defines enemies: bureaucrats, feminists, cosmopolitan elites, migrants. Takaichi’s announcements on “order” in immigration, on the protection of “traditional values,” on faster decision-making by the state read in this light like Japan’s chapter of a global narrative. In the United States this narrative has long become a governing style, in Italy a tool of normalization, in Hungary a routine of power retention. In Japan it now receives – perhaps – a new government coat of arms.

The connection to Donald Trump is more than a diplomatic choreography. It is ideological resonance. Trump values in Tokyo what he preaches at home: sovereignty as primacy, military as politics by other means, trade as weapon. Takaichi in turn admires at the White House what she has raised to method: strength as stance, hardness as language, simplification as strategy. If Trump in the coming days demands that Japan must drastically increase its defense spending, if he presses for new arms purchases, if he treats investment commitments as loyalty tests, then he meets in Takaichi a counterpart who nods out of conviction – and calculation. The gesture of resolute alignment with Washington helps her marginalize domestic resistance. The alignment itself shifts the region, because it normalizes conflict.

However, one would do well to take the Japanese context seriously. The coalition of the LDP and Ishin is fragile, arithmetically stretched to its limit, reliant on shifting majorities. Komeito, Buddhist-inspired and for years the guarantor of centrist balance, is not just partner but also seismograph of a society that in many respects thinks conservatively but finds authoritarian solutions risky. The cost of breaking with Komeito may be higher than the early days of government formation suggest: majorities in both upper and lower houses must be reorganized each time, every bill becomes a test case, each crisis an occasion for opposition coalitions. This is exactly where it becomes clear whether the virus of hardening truly infects the entire system or whether the veins of parliamentary democracy remain resilient.

The gender dimension is not a side issue but a yardstick. It is a bitter irony that the very first woman in the office of prime minister embodies an agenda that normatively limits female autonomy. That prominent feminists such as Chizuko Ueno do not celebrate the historical moment but lament it is a clue to the core of the far-right strategy: representation without emancipation, symbolism without structural change. Whoever smashes the glass ceiling with a fist may still leave the old house standing beneath. That is exactly how diversity becomes facade, not practice.

In foreign policy the situation is no less paradoxical. Takaichi will likely try to keep relations with China and South Korea on a narrow ridge: stable enough for trade and diplomacy, confrontational enough for her base. Revisionist signals are domestic politics in Tokyo but in Beijing and Seoul the chronicle of unprocessed violence. Every symbolic act to the Yasukuni Shrine is there read as a refusal to regard the past as admonition. In this constellation the rhetoric of deterrence gains the upper hand: the doubling of the defense budget by 2027, the debate about pre-emptive strike capabilities, the technically sounding papers on “counter-attack options” – all of this is not just strategy but language. And language creates reality long before rockets confirm it.

The economy is in this narrative the joker that aces everything – and yet heals nothing. Price brakes, subsidies, tax reliefs, higher wage impulses: the arsenal is familiar. It buys time, not consent. And it does not cover the fact that Japan stands before a demographic cliff that cannot be stayed with border fortifications and identity politics. Who fights labor shortage with cultural protectionism creates a paradox that will eventually burst politically: yesterday’s prosperity becomes the norm that must be secured with tomorrow’s hands without inviting tomorrow’s people in. The virus of the far right feeds precisely on this tension by shifting the burdens of transition onto those with least lobby and turning responsibility into morality.

It would be convenient to label Takaichi as the Japanese Meloni or to place her next to Le Pen and Orbán in a gallery of the usual suspects. But such mirror-images obscure what makes the moment dangerous: it is not the individuals that are the problem but the habituation to their premises. When the exception-state of debate – over migration, security, history, gender – becomes the everyday, when the political rituals of escalation replace the art of compromise, when the quick appeasement of the own base becomes more important than the slow understanding with the others, then the space in which democracy can breathe narrows. This is the quiet international of the far right: no formal alliance, but a shared grammar of power.

That is why the upcoming vote in the National Diet is more than a change of government. It is a stress-test of whether Japan’s political immune system can endure the coexistence of conflict and institution. The minority coalition in this respect is both blessing and risk: it forces negotiation but complicates enforceability; it prevents unilateral rule but also favors the temptation to define politics by symbolic acts. And it will show in interplay with Washington how much strategic autonomy Tokyo can assert in a world where the United States under Trump turns security into commodity and alliance loyalty into price.

Perhaps the most consoling aspect of the virus metaphor is that societies can acquire immunity. Not by ignoring it but by confronting it with dosage of reason. In Japan that means: conduct historical debates openly, without using them as loyalty tests; label the economic dilemmas honestly, rather than disguising them as narratives of purity; reinforce political competition, not only one’s own identity. Anyone who dismisses Sanae Takaichi merely as a quirky ultra-conservative overlooks her professionalism. Anyone who stylizes her as a savior of new seriousness confuses determination with insight. In the end it is not the gesture at the shrine that counts but the attitude toward doubt. In the ability to doubt it will be decided whether Japan’s turning-point becomes a national episode – or another chapter in the chronicle of a virus that afflicts the world.