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2025 October 15 - 21 TOP3 [POLITICS]

Double-tongued ‘Nippon Ishin no Kai’ party

Akahata ‘current’ column (excerpts)

After last year’s general election, Baba Nobuyuki, then “Nippon Ishin no Kai” leader, stated, “Collaboration (with the LDP) will be impossible.” He even described the LDP’s handling of the “politics and money” allegations as “nothing but a betrayal”.

Yoshimura Hirofumi, the current co-leader of the Ishin party, stated last year that if the party joined the ruling coalition, it would cease to exist and lose its very reason for being. He emphasized that there would be no need for the Ishin party to take part in power in order to achieve its policy goals. However, Yoshimura on October 16 stated, “I believe we should take on the challenge (of forming a coalition with the LDP) for Japan’s sake even if it risks the party’s dissolution.” Reportedly, the Ishin party on October 18 reached a basic agreement on forming a coalition government with the Takaichi-led LDP. How hypocritical!

In the LDP-Ishin coalition negotiations, the “definite condition” that Yoshimura set out was a reduction in the number of Diet seats, rather than the eradication of the backroom moneyed politics that he himself had severely criticized.

The Ishin party has blatantly shifted the focus away from the “politics and money” issue, which most voters paid attention to in the last two national elections, to issues that are not even a point of controversy this time. This demonstrates how desperate the Ishin party is to enter a coalition.

All the political parties that had formed a coalition with the LDP came to a miserable end. This is because their existence only served to prolong the life of the LDP. The real “challenge” is to replace LDP politics.