Polls show Japan's first female prime minister and her coalition within reach of a decisive win in snap elections on Sunday. Sanae Takaichi got an additional boost in the form of an endorsement from President Trump, which appears to be the first time a U.S. president has backed a Japanese leader in an election. "While Trump is often an outlier," noted a Kyodo News Agency report, "it is very rare for the leader of any country to back a specific political figure ahead of a national election in a foreign country." Despite robust approval ratings mostly in the 60% range, Takaichi, whom Trump praised as "strong, powerful and wise," has a fragile new coalition with a narrow majority in the lower house of parliament, and a minority in the upper house. Polls predict she could win a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives, which could empower her to pursue a conservative agenda, with policies that, by her own admission, could prove highly controversial. "I also want to resolutely take up challenges that include bold policies and reforms that could split public opinion," Takaichi said last month, as she tried to convince the public why elections were needed only four months into her administration. Takaichi is leveraging her popularity to increase her political power, turning the election into a sort of referendum on her and her policies, says Koichi Nakano, a political scientist at Sophia University in Tokyo. "This election is really like a presidential election," Nakano says. Takaichi's message seems to be: " 'Give me power,' without really specifying what she's going to do." But Takaichi has previously made many of her priorities clear. She is a protégé of the late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and shares his ambition to cast off post-war stigma and restrictions on Japan's military and make it a "normal" country. Since its establishment in 1955, Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has sought to revise the country's post-war constitution, especially its Article 9, in which Japan renounces the right to wage war as a means of resolving international disputes. At one of Prime Minister Takaichi's recent campaign rallies, 50-year-old Koichi Sato, who came with his family, said he's worried about global instability, and he thinks Takaichi can address that. "In 10 or 20 years, our children will still have a future ahead of them, so I want Japan to be a place where they can live and feel safe." Another supporter, Manami Itoga, says she didn't pay much attention to politics before Takaichi became Prime Minister. Just weeks after she took office, Takaichi's comments about Taiwan triggered a diplomatic spat with China, but Itoga says she's on the same page as Takaichi. "I'm worried that Japan will somehow be taken over by Chinese people," she says, "because the number of Chinese [in Japan] is increasing rapidly. Things like that are circulating on Instagram and other social media, aren't they?"