Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae has just scored an unprecedented victory in the country’s general election. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which she leads, won 316 seats in the 465-member House of Representatives (the Diet’s lower house), up sharply from 198. The combined strength of two parties that had merged hastily – despite their fundamentally opposing platforms – in an effort to bring Takaichi down fell from 167 seats to just 49. The LDP, which celebrated its 70th anniversary last year, has never looked more robust.
Only moments after Takaichi became the LDP’s president last October, the party’s coalition partner of a quarter-century, Komeito, abruptly defected. With that, there was no guarantee that she could secure a majority in the lower house to become prime minister. Then, after she dissolved the chamber and called a general election in order to obtain a stronger mandate, Komeito, backed by disciplined religious voters, quickly merged with the largest opposition force, the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan.
Takaichi survived the first shock by forming a new coalition with a smaller party closer to her own policy line. She crushed the second challenge by setting the period for election campaigning to an unprecedentedly brief 16 days, leaving the new opposition alliance scant time to build name recognition.
The prime minister is herself something of a newcomer, having risen to the party presidency in a political culture that long assumed that a politician, and certainly a national leader, must be male. Rather than relying on the usual social circles that fostered the careers of her senior colleagues, she nurtured her ambitions on her own.
Casting herself as the lead actor, she wrote the script and directed the plot to stage an election in which a maverick heroine clears one obstacle af ter another, growing stronger each time, before finally reaching an apparently invincible position. Voters seemed captivated by the narrative. Even seasoned commentators failed to foresee how many first-time voters would turn out.
Takaichi now plans to overhaul the way Japan drafts its national budget. During the campaign, she repeatedly stressed that she needed political capital precisely for that purpose. For decades, the country has relied on a two-step process: a modest initial budget at the start of the fiscal year, followed by a supplementary budget six months later to cover shortfalls. Takaichi wants to abolish this practice and rely on a single budget at the start of the year. With the end of routine supplementary budgets, the fiscal stance would shift away from the austerity regime that has shaped the economy for three decades.
Japan has no time, she warned throughout the campaign. Whether the challenge is to reduce dependence on China for critical minerals, build advanced crop factories to strengthen food self-sufficiency, or update military platforms to match the technologies revealed in Ukraine to be essential to warfighting, Japan must act or risk losing the opportunity to do so in the future. A country that stops addressing its challenges, she argued, has no future. Voters appear to have embraced that ambitious vision.
Even so, this is only the beginning. Unlike the lower house, the Diet’s upper house cannot be dissolved by the prime minister. Its next regular election is not due until 2028. If the LDP, now still a minority faction there, can strengthen its position as decisively as it has in the lower house, it could secure the two-thirds majorities in both chambers that are required to initiate constitutional change, a cause which Takaichi inherited from her mentor, the late Abe Shinzo. To win any subsequent national referendum on constitutional reform, the government will need strong backing from both houses.
Japan’s constitution has never been amended, an extraordinary exception among democracies. A clause renouncing the possession of the means of war has long functioned as a convenient fiction. Takaichi wants to correct this, and she has made explicit recognition of the constitutionality of Japan’s armed forces central to the LDP’s identity. But achieving that goal will require at least three more years of sustained commitment.
Whether an ageing Japan can transform itself in short order under a maverick prime minister remains uncertain. Yet some economists argue that the demographic clock may not be as unforgiving as often assumed. If female and elderly labour-force participation were each to rise by ten percentage points, and if the productivity gains expected from artificial intelligence are added to the equation, Japan could offset much of its demographic drag without relying heavily on immigration. While this possibility (still debated) does not eliminate the urgency of reform, it does suggest that the country retains more room for manoeuvre than is commonly believed.
For now, Takaichi is wagering that voters are ready for a more assertive course. If she can convert electoral capital into sustained structural change, her victory may mark the start of a new political cycle in Japan. If not, it will be remembered as a spectacular but fleeting moment. We will soon find out which future will prevail.
The writer, a former special adviser to Prime Minister Abe Shinz, is Chairman of Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), a conservative lobbying organization.
