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Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes the electoral geography of the Sanseitô surge in Japan’s 2025 Upper House elections at the municipal level, thereby testing the persistence of relative electoral stability in shrinking rural areas.

Paper long abstract

The 2025 elections for the Upper House of the Japanese National Diet were marked by the sudden rise of the right-wing populist party Sanseitô. Amidst growing concerns around inflation, US-Japan relations, and immigration, the Sanseitô gained a striking 12.5% of the votes by embracing harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric and a political style that resembles other right-wing populist parties in Europe as well as the MAGA movement in the US. Given the recent electoral vulnerability of the ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), it is an important question if and to what extent the Sanseitô surge indeed signals a lasting shift in the Japanese party system.

In sharp contrast to Europe and the US, Japan did not have a strong right-wing populist contender until recently. This is striking, not least, because of the presence of lasting regional disparities: Large parts of non-metropolitan Japan have been struggling with prolonged economic dependency, aging, and out-migration – a socio-spatial constellation that has consistently been identified as a fertile breeding ground for anti-establishment (right-wing) counter-movements in Europe and the US. So far, however, Japan’s shrinking rural areas have remained strongholds for the ruling LDP. In fact, a municipal-level analysis of the Lower House elections between 2012-2021 showed that those areas facing the highest levels of long-term decline and economic dependency (“depopulating regions”, kaso chiiki) not only display stronger support for the LDP, but also higher turnout and lower support for “third parties” – all of which suggests that Japan’s shrinking rural areas remain less inclined to electoral discontent than their urban counterparts. The results of the 2024 Lower House elections confirmed this pattern.

The Sanseitô surge in the 2025 Upper House elections offers an ideal opportunity to put the relative electoral stability in Japan’s shrinking rural areas to the test. This paper draws from granular municipal-level data to analyze the electoral geography of the 2025 Sanseitô surge. We hypothesize that the specific socio-spatial characteristics of shrinking rural areas – esp. the combination of aging and economic dependency – continue to favor the established conservative LDP over the anti-establishment contender.