Japan’s parliament on Tuesday elected ultraconservative Sanae Takaichi as the country’s first female prime minister, a historic first that comes one day after her struggling party struck a coalition deal with a new partner that would pull her governing bloc further to the right.
In a parliamentary vote, lawmakers in the Lower House voted for Takaichi with 237 votes, more than what was needed for a simple majority. Earlier, she won the vote in the less powerful Upper House, of parliament.
Takaichi will replace Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, ending a three-month political vacuum and wrangling since the Liberal Democratic Party’s disastrous election loss in July.
Ishiba, who lasted only one year in office, resigned with his Cabinet earlier Tuesday, paving the way for his successor.
Who is Sanae Takaichi?
Born in 1961 in Nara Prefecture, Takaichi’s mother was a police officer and her father worked in an office. She was renowned for carrying a lot of sticks which she often broke as an avid heavy metal drummer.
The conservative was not known to be any where politics until the 1980s when trade tensions between the US and Japan were at their highest.
In 1996, she was elected to a parliamentary seat with the LDP. She became known as one of the party’s most vocal conservative voices and has since been elected as an MP ten times with only one defeat.
While she becomes the first woman serving as Japan’s prime minister, she is in no rush to promote gender equality or diversity.
Takaichi, 64, is among Japanese politicians who have stonewalled measures for women’s advancement. Takaichi supports the imperial family’s male-only succession and opposes same-sex marriage and allowing separate surnames for married couples.
She has also openly talked about her struggles to have biological children but has helped to raise three children from her husband’s previous marriage and in a country where several prime ministers and MPs are the sons, grandsons, or even great-grandsons of politicians, her endeavor to rise through the ranks of politics without a familial tie is somewhat respected. However a major test lies ahead for Takaichi.
With a fractured oppostion, the LDP’s off-the-cuff alliance with the Osaka-based rightwing Japan Innovation Party, or Ishin no Kai, ensured her premiership but the real test comes ahead nonetheless.
Short of a majority in both houses of parliament and they need to court other opposition groups to pass any legislation – a risk that could make her government unstable and short-lived.
