The Irish Times view on the Japanese election: a landslide victory

With a dramatic gamble on a surprise election and short campaign, the conservative prime minister not only gave herself a new and unchallengeable authority, breaking from the shackles of minority government, but rescued her Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) from what appeared a dangerously steep decline. Takaichi has promised to seek to amend the country’s constitution, a pledge associated particularly with its pacifist prohibition in Article 9, which bars the country from maintaining armed forces with the capacity for war. The prime minister, who models herself on Margaret Thatcher’s radical politics, has also promised to implement two key elements of her election programme, a controversial price-cutting suspension of consumption tax on food for two years and a Trump-inspired increase in defence spending.