The age of Takaichi dawns
Understanding what happened on Sunday
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Japan’s 8 February general election was by any measure historic and will reshape Japan’s political landscape for years to come. I have tried to walk through some of the implications based on what we have learned so far.
What happened?
Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae led the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to a historic victory in Japan’s general election, which decided control of the 465-seat House of Representatives. The LDP, which went into the election with a minority, finished with 316 seats, clearing the 310 seats needed for a supermajority and surpassing even the lofty expectations heading into the election. This is the largest majority the LDP has won in its seventy-year history.
The party won everywhere, in all regions. Its winners included fifty-five candidates who returned after losing previous elections and sixty-six newcomers, the latter who will now become the “Takaichi children.” The victors included 32 of the 38 LDP candidates who had been implicated in the party’s slush fund scandal. According to Kyodo’s exit poll, the party won 21.8% of independents, the most of any party and up from 12.9% in 2024. It also increased its support, as the exit poll found that 38.7% said they support the LDP. The LDP was supported by voters from every generation, including 36.6% of voters under 60 and 42.4% of voters over 60. The former figure was the LDP’s highest ever and marked an 8.7% increase relative to 2024. The LDP’s support among 18 and 19-year olds was 37.9%, a 14.8-point increase, and its support among voters in their 20s was 33.1%, a 13.2-point increase. Takaichi clearly changed the party’s image among young voters, raising its support with the young to new heights. Its support was also robust among both men and women, with 40.4% of men and 36.8% of women supporting the LDP.
It was indisputable a victory for Takaichi herself. She has remained more popular for longer into her tenure than basically any of her predecessors. As the above-mentioned figures suggest, she is popular with many different segments of the public, and had long coattails for the LDP. She gambled on a snap election and can claim a mandate to pursue her ambitions. With more than two years until the next upper house election and at most four years until the next general election, she will have time and the political space to act.
Was it only because of Takaichi’s popularity?
The LDP itself may have been surprised by the scale of its victory, suggesting that there was something more to the election than just Takaichi’s popularity. The party actually did so well in single-member districts (SMDs) that it ended up not having enough candidates for the proportional representation seats that it did win (assuming that some of those PR seats would be filled by candidates who lost their SMD races).
Arguably the reason the LDP’s victory was so historically big was that on top of Takaichi’s popularity, the LDP benefited from the virtual collapse in the vote for the mainstream opposition party, the Centrist Reform Alliance (CRA).
How so?
While it was unclear whether the Centrist Reform Alliance (CRA), the party forged before the campaign by a merger of the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP) and Kōmeitō, would coalesce, the CRA performed far worse than anyone expected, winning only seven of 289 single-member districts and 49 seats, 123 fewer than it held before the general election. The CRA’s defeat was total, as longtime heavyweights – Okada Katsuya, Edano Yukio, Azumi Jun, Ozawa Ichirō, Nagatsuma Akira, Mabuchi Sumio, and Genba Kōichirō – also lost their races. The party was swept in strongholds like Hokkaido, Aichi, and Nagano. In the eighty seats of greater Tokyo – Tokyo, Saitama, Kanagawa, and Chiba prefectures – the party won only a single single-member district, CRA co-leader Noda Yoshiko’s Chiba-14 constituency. The LDP won every other seat. The CRA actually won fewer SMDs than the Democratic Party for the People (DPFP), which ran significantly fewer candidates but still won eight seats. It appears that the CRA was in fact less than the sum of its parts, as CDP supporters appeared to have abandoned the CRA in droves in protest at the compromises Noda made in joining with Kōmeitō. The CRA’s defeat was so total that it should not only result in a leadership change but will prompt questions as to whether the CRA will even hang together at all, particularly since the CDP and Kōmeitō did not merge their upper house caucuses or local branches. As I discussed before the election, the outcome confirms an opposition wholly out of touch with younger voters, an increasingly important voting bloc among whom the CRA finished fifth according to Kyodo’s exit poll.
The defeat of veterans from the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) years makes this a truly epochal moment; the figures who have dominated the mainstream opposition for decades are gone. Who takes their place and in what form remains to be seen.
What about other opposition parties?
Takaichi also completely overwhelmed two anti-establishment conservative parties who had made gains in recent national elections. The Democratic Party for the People (DPFP), like the CDP an offshoot of the DPJ but the more conservative of the two, had emerged as a voice speaking on behalf of urban workers by calling for tax reforms and other policies to boost take-home pay. (It also continued to be backed by private-sector unions). While the DPFP actually gained a seat, it fell well short of the gains it had hoped for and its position in a system dominated by Takaichi’s LDP is unclear.
The LDP may still be interested in the DPFP as a partner in order to control the upper house – the government still does not have a majority – though its need for the DPFP’s cooperation in the upper house is not as urgent now that the LDP on its own as a supermajority that enables it to override the upper house.
If Tamaki is ambitious, he could try to make the DPFP the nucleus of a new opposition bloc, though Tamaki has repeatedly prevaricated when presented with opportunities to assume greater leadership. In the immediate term, Tamaki will fare no better than others in resisting Takaichi, but the party’s long-term future is still in question.
And Sanseitō?
The “anti-globalist” party, whose strong performance in the 2025 upper house elections, put it on the proverbial map, increased its seat total from two to 15, but it had been aiming higher, having fielded 190 candidates across the country. As its leader, Kamiya Sōhei acknowledged, Takaichi’s rise took the wind of its sails as Takaichi not only drew conservatives who may have defected to Sanseitō and other parties in recent elections but also watched as Takaichi’s LDP learned how to use social media and short-form video to appeal to younger voters, something that heretofore had been the province of Sanseitō and the DPFP. The party is still a political fixture now, and will have an ambivalent relationship with the government as it cheers on Takaichi’s pursuit of “Japan First” policies, particularly regarding Japan’s foreign population, while attacking the LDP as a rotten institution. The party’s organization strength suggests it will continue to grow – next year’s 2027 unified local elections will be an important test – but it is for the moment in eclipse.
How about on the left?
As much as the general election was a disaster for the CRA, it was terrible for left-wing parties too. The Japanese Communist Party (JCP) lost its only SMD – Okinawa-1 – and saw its seat total halved from eight to four. Reiwa Shinsengumi, the left-wing party of choice for younger voters, saw its seat total plunge from eight to one. While there is more to Takaichi’s victory than a straightforward “Japan’s voters are shifting to the right” narrative – for young voters in particular, they may be responding more to the perception of dynamic leadership than to ideology – the Japanese left appears to be completely outmoded, with no answer to many of the challenges that Japan faces.
Any other opposition parties?
The biggest surprise of the campaign was the emergence of Team Mirai, a small party led by AI engineer Anno Takahiro described as “neither left nor right” that is oriented towards addressing future challenges. After Anno won the party’s first seat in the 2025 upper house elections, it won 11 PR seats in this general election.
What about Ishin no Kai, the LDP’s partner?
The Osaka-based Ishin no Kai did not have a terrible election – it increased its seat total from 34 to 36. But it lost a seat in Osaka for the first time since 2017, and it is increasingly bottled up in Osaka. Of the 36 seats it won, 26 were in Osaka SMDs or the Kinki (Kansai region) PR block. Any hopes it once had of becoming a national player have receded. Meanwhile, the party now finds itself supporting an LDP that no longer really needs Ishin no Kai’s help in the lower house. The LDP is not going to boot Ishin no Kai from the coalition, but the junior partner’s leverage – already limited – can only be lessened. It has little ability to force Takaichi to prioritize the party’s priorities, reducing the number of Diet seats or passing a bill to establish an auxiliary capital, when those priorities are divisive within the LDP.
What about turnout?
It may take some time to see the precise turnout data, particularly with breakdown by age that will be particularly revealing, but it appears that turnout surpassed 56%, somewhere between two and three points higher than 2024. It is likely that winter weather suppressed turnout in parts of Japan’s snow country, but higher turnout in urban centers on the Pacific coast may have more than offset the decline in turnout elsewhere. It was not necessarily an explosive increase, a return to the levels seen in elections during the first decade of the century, but what increase there was in all likelihood boosted the LDP’s numbers and flipped races that had in the past been closely contested. In the end, it may well have been a larger, younger electorate than previously, factors that would clearly favor Takaichi and the LDP in this general election.
What happens next?
The Diet is expected to reconvene on 18 February, at which point it will reelect Takaichi as prime minister, enabling her to reaffirm her cabinet (she said Sunday that she did not anticipate making changes to the lineup yet). In the final ten days of February, the prime minister and cabinet ministers will deliver their policy speeches, and Takaichi will face questioning from opposition leaders. Then, the lower house budget committee is expected to take up the FY2026 budget – delayed by the general election – in early March.
What to do about the budget is the most immediate question facing the prime minister. She openly campaigned on expansionary fiscal policy, as she wants to use public spending on industrial policy, defense, and social policy to make a stronger, more self-reliant, resilient Japan. The drafting of the budget approved by her government in December began under her predecessor, Ishiba Shigeru; with the budget’s passage already delayed, which will require a provisional budget at the start of the fiscal year, she may want to make some changes to the budget before submitting it to the Diet. In general, it is possible that Takaichi, empowered by her historic mandate, will train her attention on the Ministry of Finance, already her bête noire and now perhaps the single greatest constraint remaining on her government. Her decisions on fiscal policy will have significant implications for financial markets, which are already wary of her policy commitments and which could continue selling off the yen and Japanese government bonds.
The prime minister also faces immediate challenges on foreign policy. While she earned an unexpected endorsement from US President Donald Trump, she will have to manage a summit with Trump in 19 March, ahead of which Japan will be expected to finalize its first-round of investment projects in the US as part of the US-Japan trade deal. She will also have to navigate Trump’s wishes for dealmaking with China with the worsening tensions between Japan and China following Takaichi’s remarks about a Taiwan crisis. Takaichi immediately signaled that, in the wake of the election, she could send a strong signal to China, saying in an interview that she wants to lay the groundwork for a visit to Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan’s war dead, through communication with Japan’s neighbors and allies, a visit that would not only be poorly received in Beijing but which could also undermine her recent efforts to strengthen cooperation with South Korea.
As this latter gesture suggests, she will use her mandate to pursue some policies desired by her conservative base, including bills on flag desecration, counter-espionage, and imperial succession, and broader policy challenges regarding Japan’s foreign population. A broader question that Takaichi will face is whether to use her unprecedented majority in the House of Representatives to press ahead with constitutional revision as a legacy-sealing accomplishment. Her popularity, the opposition’s disarray, and the general lack of major opposition to revision could position her to succeed where others, including her mentor Abe Shinzō, failed.
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In the end, Takaichi’s victory itself does not solve the problems facing Japan. She still has to navigate an extraordinarily challenging international environment, fiscal constraints, declining international competitiveness, and an aging, shrinking population. She faces extraordinarily high expectations that she will overcome these challenges that have frustrated many of her predecessors. But she has reset the clock on LDP dominance, ending an interlude in which the LDP appeared increasingly moribund, out of touch, and ultimately not in control of either house of the Diet. Every opposition party now finds itself entering a period of soul-searching as they try to learn from Takaichi’s victory and find a way to compete with a rejuvenated LDP.
In the meantime, the age of Takaichi is only just getting started.
This distant observer likes Takaichi and thing she'll be great for Japan. Of course, time will tell.