{"id":18216,"date":"2025-10-20T19:12:17","date_gmt":"2025-10-20T17:12:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kaizen-blog.org\/?p=18216"},"modified":"2025-10-20T19:12:20","modified_gmt":"2025-10-20T17:12:20","slug":"ein-virus-der-die-welt-befaellt-sanae-takaichi-trump-und-die-stille-internationale-der-ultrarechten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kaizen-blog.org\/en\/ein-virus-der-die-welt-befaellt-sanae-takaichi-trump-und-die-stille-internationale-der-ultrarechten\/","title":{"rendered":"A Virus That Afflicts the World \u2013 Sanae Takaichi, Trump, and the Quiet International of the Far Right"},"content":{"rendered":"

Japan\u2019s political scene stands at a turning point \u2013 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 \u2013 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 \u2013 in exhaustion, price pressure, mistrust, a weariness of complexity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Takaichi\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sanae Takaichi used to play drums in a heavy-metal band and describes herself as a fan of Black Sabbath<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The woman who has become a flag-carrier in a men\u2019s 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 \u201crestoration.\u201d 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\u2019s security agenda together form a coordinate system in which dissent is weakness and doubt decadence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 all of that is the best soil for a politics that does not solve problems but defines enemies: bureaucrats, feminists, cosmopolitan elites, migrants. Takaichi\u2019s announcements on \u201corder\u201d in immigration, on the protection of \u201ctraditional values,\u201d on faster decision-making by the state read in this light like Japan\u2019s 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 \u2013 perhaps \u2013 a new government coat of arms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 and calculation. The gesture of resolute alignment with Washington helps her marginalize domestic resistance. The alignment itself shifts the region, because it normalizes conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n