conservative

Voters in Japan are casting their ballots in a parliamentary election expected to deliver a resounding victory for Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s conservative coalition.

The snap vote on Sunday comes as Takaichi seeks a new mandate to push through an ambitious agenda, including increased defence spending and tougher immigration measures.

The coalition of Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Japan Innovation Party, known as Ishin, could win more than 300 of the 465 seats in the lower house of parliament, according to multiple opinion polls.

The figure would mark a substantial gain from ⁠the 233 it is defending.

The opposition, despite the formation of a new centrist alliance and a rising far-right, is seen as too splintered to be a real challenger.

Takaichi, 64, is Japan’s first female prime minister and took office in October after being selected as the LDP’s leader. The ultraconservative politician has pledged to “work, work, work”, and her style – seen as both playful and tough – has resonated with younger voters.

She has said she will step down if the LDP fails to win a majority.

Rising cost of living

Voters on Sunday will select lawmakers in 289 single-seat constituencies, with the remainder decided by proportional representation votes for parties. Polls close at 8pm local time (11:00 GMT), when broadcasters are expected to issue projections based on exit polls.

The rising cost of living has taken centre stage in the election.

The issue is voters’ main concern, with prices rising while real wage growth lags behind inflation, leaving households worse off. Japan also faces longstanding problems with sluggish economic growth. The economy expanded just 1.1 percent last year and is on track to grow by only 0.7 percent in 2026, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Takaichi has promised to suspend the 8 percent sales tax on food for two years to help households cope with rising prices.

The pledge follows the approval last year of Japan’s largest stimulus package since the COVID-19 pandemic, a 21.3 trillion yen ($136bn) injection into the economy, heavily focused on cost-of-living relief measures, including energy bill subsidies, cash handouts and food vouchers.

Takaichi has also promised to revise security and defence policies by December to bolster Japan’s offensive military capabilities, lifting a ban on weapons exports and moving further away from the country’s post-war pacifist principles. She has been pushing for tougher immigration policies, including stricter requirements for foreign property owners and a cap on foreign residents.

Al Jazeera’s Patrick Fok, reporting from Tokyo, said Takaichi, who is favoured by a majority of voters under the age of 30, is hoping to capitalise on her “tremendous popularity” and secure a landslide victory for her coalition.

“That result – if indeed that’s how it turns out – will mark a remarkable turnaround, really, for the LDP. Months ago, it was a party in disarray. It had lost its parliamentary majority and was embroiled in a slush fund scandal. So, this turnaround has very much been engineered by Takaichi and what some describe as an almost cult-like popularity,” Fok said.

Sunday’s vote comes amid record snowfall in parts of the country. With up to 70cm (27.5 inches) of snow forecast in northern and eastern regions, some voters will have to battle blizzards to cast their ballots. The election is only the third post-war vote held in February, with polls typically called during milder months.

Fok said the heavy snowfall could affect voter turnout, but “there’s no suggestion that’s going to impact the outcome of the election”.

“A lot of people feel that the opposition parties are not offering anything substantially different. And perhaps they feel that Takaichi’s economic agenda will boost the country in the long term,” he said.

“She has a growth-oriented strategy. She wants to develop sectors like AI and semiconductors, and accelerate defence spending. Voters are perhaps betting on that unlocking the keys to stagnant wage growth in this country, and in turn, [to] counter rising inflation that they are experiencing here.”

Foreign policy

A landslide win for Takaichi’s coalition would also likely prompt a shift in foreign policy.

“It will allow her to do two fundamentally important things,” said Stephen Nagy, a professor of politics and international studies at the International Christian University.

“The first thing is to invest in the Japan-United States alliance, tighten its partnership, and secure that relationship,” he told Al Jazeera. “Second, it will allow her to take a more realistic approach to China by balancing engagement through trade and trying to deal with regional challenges, such as terrorism or climate change, and also resilience and deterrence policy.”

Nagy noted that Takaichi received the endorsement of US President Donald Trump on Thursday and called the move a “mixed blessing”.

On one hand, the Japanese public has been worried about Trump’s tariffs and his overtures to China.

“If he is going to create a G-2 relationship with China, this is going to come at the expense of Japan’s security and ordinary citizens’ idea of security in the region,” Nagy said.

On the other hand, the Trump endorsement helps because the Japanese public “are used to the strongest and most robust Japan-US alliance over the past 80 years” and believe that Takaichi will bring stability and forge a stronger relationship with Washington, he said.

Bad Bunny is constantly making history. Last Sunday he broke a new record by winning album of the year at the Grammys for his 2025 album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” which was the first fully Spanish-language album to claim the title; and come Feb. 8, a.k.a. Super Bowl Sunday, he’ll be the headlining act at the Super Bowl halftime show.

Yet he is also teaching history. Bad Bunny’s latest record is not only a celebration of Puerto Rico and its people, but it offers a window into some of the challenges the embattled territory is currently facing — including massive migration, displacement and an infrastructure on the brink of collapse. In a moment when education is under attack, both in the United States and Puerto Rico, Bad Bunny is using pop culture’s biggest stage to offer the world a history lesson. And in this political context, that matters greatly.

In December 2024, I was contacted by Bad Bunny’s team to produce 17 pages outlining Puerto Rican history, to pair with each song’s YouTube visualizer for “DTMF.” Altogether, they have been viewed more than 775 million times.

I later produced 40 slides jam-packed with historical and cultural facts about Puerto Rico, which were screened at Bad Bunny’s 31-show residency in San Juan. These ranged from facts about the history of women’s suffrage to the founding of Puerto Rico’s oldest punk band, La Experiencia de Toñito Cabanillas.

When Bad Bunny was announced as the NFL’s choice to headline the halftime show, I was hardly surprised by the backlash from conservatives — including multiple Fox News hosts, podcasters and even President Trump, who said, “I don’t know who he is. I don’t know why they’re doing it … [It’s] crazy.”

As communities of color celebrated on social media, critics raised two questions: Why would a Spanish-speaking artist — even if he is the most-streamed artist on Earth — be chosen for that stage? And why wouldn’t they choose a more patriotic, Anglo-American artist?

While undoubtedly xenophobic in nature, these questions highlight their acute ignorance about the place that birthed Bad Bunny, and its ongoing entanglement with the United States.

Puerto Rico was first colonized by the Spanish from 1493 until 1898, the year that the United States occupied the country as part of the Spanish-American War. Later, in 1917, Puerto Ricans became U.S. citizens through the Jones Law. Eventually, we drafted a constitution and became a Commonwealth of the United States in 1952. But there is never one single historical narrative.

What these facts occlude, however, is that Puerto Ricans are second-class citizens who cannot vote for the president — and those in the archipelago are not fully protected by the U.S. Bill of Rights. According to the U.S. Supreme Court’s early-20th century Insular Cases, we belong to the United States, but we are not part of it.

Put simply: We are a colony of the United States in the 21st century.

When drafting the historical narratives for “DTMF,” Bad Bunny understood that Puerto Rican history is often unknown, even to our own people. He was interested in making history available for those who don’t have access to higher education. He wanted me to write these narratives in a candid manner to be read by people in the barriadas y caserios (working-class neighborhoods and the projects). These were the places where I came of age in Puerto Rico.

With the success of “DTMF,” Puerto Rican history was amplified to the world. I’ve had countless conversations with journalists from around the globe, who marveled at how little they knew about Puerto Rico’s history or its relationship to the United States. This is precisely what I think drives those debates about language and who gets the right to claim Americanness — a lack of information.

And even though Bad Bunny is a U.S. citizen, conservatives have organized an alternative “All-American Halftime Show,” which reveals how “Americanness” is policed through language and race. This is the product of willful ignorance.

Puerto Rico’s history is also that of Latin American, Caribbean, United States and Latinx communities. I believe Bad Bunny’s performance will invite people to understand the beauty and complexity of our people’s history, even if it makes outsiders uncomfortable. That he will also be doing so entirely in Spanish in a moment when Latinx people in the United States are being arrested or interrogated by federal agents for speaking in Spanish — or simply for having an accent? That matters.

Of course, artists alone will not save us from the perils of racism and xenophobia — I learned that from my time in the punk community. We cannot just wait on anyone, especially not celebrities, to change institutions without some people power to back them up.

Yet given his enormous reach — just this week his latest album hit No. 1 on Apple Music in China — Bad Bunny has the power to move the cultural needle. And if there’s one thing to take from the Grammys ceremony last Sunday, it’s that he’s not alone — other artists have taken a stand on anti-immigrant violence. They are living up to the moment. That matters too.

So while conservatives organize their bland counter to the Super Bowl halftime show — with none other than Kid Rock as headliner — Bad Bunny will be offering the world a much more valuable history lesson, full of sazón, batería y reggaetón.

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo is the author of “Puerto Rico: A National History” and associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.