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For only the second time this century, the long-standing coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party and Kōmeito has lost its majority in Japan’s House of Representatives. This was always going to be a punishing election for the LDP, with the key question going into election day simply being how bad the outcome would be for the ruling party, but losing the coalition’s majority is an exceptionally bad result. While the opposition parties now hold more seats than the coalition, they are highly fragmented and unlikely to try to form their own coalition government – moreover, the LDP remains the largest party in the Diet, and thus the natural core of any new coalition. Negotiations to piece together a new majority, however, will be difficult, not least because the LDP itself is deeply divided internally.

The Results

Party	Pre-Election	Post-Election	Change
Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)	247	191	-56
Kōmeito	32	24	-8
Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP)	98	148	+50
Democratic Party for the People (DPP)	7	28	+21
Japan Innovation Party (Ishin)	44	38	-6
Japanese Communist Party (JCP)	10	8	-2
Reiwa Shinsengumi (Reiwa)	3	9	+6
Social Democratic Party (SDP)	1	1	0
Sanseitō	1	3	+2
Conservative Party of Japan (Hoshutō)	0	3	+3
Independents/Others	22	12	-10

The Losers

Ishiba Shigeru

Going into this election, everyone knew that the LDP would lose seats. The party has had a terrible couple of years, lurching from the scandal over its connections to the Unification Church right into another scandal over slush funds and misreported finances, and this election was voters’ first chance to express their displeasure at the ballot box. It’s clear that the reason the party opted for Ishiba Shigeru in its recent leadership election was to try to limit the electoral damage. Ishiba’s status as perennial outsider meant his hands were genuinely clean, and his intention to reform the party from within could be taken seriously by the public – whereas his main rival, Takaichi Sanae, belonged to the faction most heavily implicated in the slush fund scandal and 13 of her 20 nominations for the leadership race came from lawmakers the party had disciplined for misreporting their political funding. His job in the short time ahead of the election was to convince the public that the LDP had changed and did not need to be thrashed at the ballot box, with his main strategy in that regard being to withhold party endorsements and PR list places from all 46 members disciplined over the scandal.

Both strategies failed – Ishiba’s strategy to placate voters, and the party’s strategy in choosing him to limit their electoral losses. Losing 52 seats (the official seat tally shown in the table above does not include 12 candidates who were forced to run as independents when the party removed its endorsement over the financial scandals; four of them managed to win their seats and will presumably rejoin the LDP after the election) was below the lower bounds of expectations – the LDP was resigned to slipping below the 233 seat level that gives it a single-party majority, but the ruling coalition losing its majority entirely was exactly the nightmare scenario they elected Ishiba to avoid.

There will no doubt immediately be demands within the party for Ishiba to “take responsibility” for the electoral loss. Of course it remains true that the scandals for which voters punished the LDP far predated his only weeks-old leadership, but those weeks have been far from plain sailing. Critics within the party have attacked his decision-making on the timing of the election, while reports that the LDP was still quietly providing a measure of financial support to the campaigns of unendorsed members in the election was a hammer blow to his attempts to show voters that he was taking a tough line on corruption within the party. Conservatives, especially former members of the Abe faction who dislike Ishiba on principle and feel persecuted by being singled out in the slush fund scandal, would love to see him step down – but that only opens the question over who could replace him. Responding to an election in which voters punished the party for scandals by defenestrating your “clean pair of hands” leader and replacing them with someone far more stained by association with those scandals feels like the worst possible political move for the party, so cooler heads may prevail and Ishiba may get to keep his job – for now. With most of that job for the foreseeable future likely to involve delicate negotiations with potential coalition partners and managing a fractured, infighting LDP, it’s not a role many will particularly envy.

* * *

The LDP’s Conservatives

For all the schadenfreude that conservative members of the LDP may be feeling at Ishiba’s electoral failure, it was a pretty terrible election for them as well. Most of the 46 members who were punished for their role in the financial scandals were conservative members of the now-disbanded Abe Faction, and of the 46, only 18 will be returning to the Diet. The remaining 28 either lost their seats, stepped down before the election, or were candidates without a single-member district who were denied a place on the party’s PR lists entirely. Their loss diminishes the strength of the conservative wing of the party significantly, not least since the results do seem to suggest that voters did punish the scandal-hit candidates more badly than most of their colleagues – giving Ishiba and his allies a credible claim that the former Abe Faction lawmakers were an electoral liability.

While a number of senior figures on the conservative wing lost their seats, including several former Cabinet ministers, the group will take some solace from the fact that several of its most influential members were re-elected despite losing party support. Former LDP Policy Research Council chairman Hagiuda Kōichi survived a tough challenge from the CDP candidate in his Tokyo-24 constituency, while former two Ministers of Trade, Economy and Industry – Sekō Hiroshige in Wakayama-2, and Nishimura Yasutoshi in Hyogo-9 – both won fairly solid election victories. Along with conservative figurehead Takaichi Sanae, who was not implicated in the scandal and won by a huge margin in her Nara-2 constituency, these members are likely to become significant thorns in Ishiba’s side in the coming months, with their existing dislike of his leadership only being further fuelled by resentment at being forced to run without party support in this tough election.

* * *

* * *

Kōmeito

Somewhat obscured in the headlines about the LDP’s losses in this election is the fact that its smaller coalition partner, Kōmeito, also had a terrible night. The party lost a quarter of its seats, falling from 32 to 24 seats – its lowest ebb since 2009, when it fell to just 21 seats in the election that unseated the LDP / Kōmeito coalition from power for the first time. Perhaps even worse than the loss of seats, however, is the humiliation of seeing party leader Ishii Keiichi lose his seat in the Diet, being defeated by a DPP candidate in the Saitama-14 constituency. Ishii had only been party leader since September, and his defeat will force Kōmeito to find new leadership even as the party tries to figure out how to structure its new relationship with the LDP in light of the need to broaden the ruling coalition.

To some extent, Kōmeito was probably punished by voters for its association with the scandal-hit LDP – Ishii was probably a poor choice of leader from that perspective, since his Cabinet role under the Abe administration (he was Minister for Land, Transport, and Infrastructure from 2015 to 2019) arguably made it hard for him to distance himself from the party’s scandals. The party’s decline may also reflect longer-term trends, however. Kōmeito is in essence the political wing of the Soka Gakkai lay Buddhist religious movement, whose long-term spiritual leader (and founder of Kōmeito), Ikeda Daisaku, died in 2023. In the absence of his influence, Kōmeito’s ability to effectively marshal the votes of the millions of members of Soka Gakkai may be in decline – which would spell a long-term problem for the party and for its coalition with the LDP.

* * *

Nippon Ishin no Kai

The Japan Innovation Party, more commonly called Ishin no Kai, arguably didn’t have a terrible election in terms of seat numbers – it fell from 44 to 38, a change of just six seats. However, there is a very strong sense that Ishin’s wave has crested, putting an end to the idea floated just a few years ago that the party could break out of its Osaka stronghold to become the largest opposition party in the Diet nationally. Ishin completely dominates politics in Osaka, and has achieved some limited success in other parts of the Kansai region that surrounds it, but its break-out into national politics appears to have hit a hard stop.

In part that is simply because Ishin’s identity is really as a regional Osaka party – its leadership has always prioritised local Kansai politics over national ambitions, and that has placed increasing strain on its ability to portray itself as a serious national party in recent years. A recent scandal that led to a vote of no confidence in the Ishin Governor of Hyogo Prefecture seems to have removed the final breath of wind from the party’s sails nationally, with the leadership obsessing over this issue in the months leading up to the lower house election, and while Ishin candidates in other cities around the country were gamely energetic in their campaign efforts, the party’s profile overall has shifted back to simply being an Osaka party.

* * *

The Japanese Communist Party

The JCP won eight seats in the election, a decline of just two from the ten it originally held – but this performance will be a bitter disappointment for the party. Its relationship with the centre-left Constitutional Democratic Party, which saw the two parties agreeing to avoid competing for votes in single-member districts, has always been fractious and has recently broken down entirely, with the CDP leadership believing (not entirely unreasonably) that being seen to ally with the JCP costs the party a lot of centrist votes. The JCP for its part had come to believe that not running candidates in as many SMDs as possible was holding it back from winning seats in the PR districts, since the conventional wisdom is that winning PR seats requires running up the district votes by running lots of candidates.

Consequently, the JCP ran 236 candidates in this election – almost the same number as the CDP itself, which ran 237 – but won only eight seats, marking an eye-watering per-seat investment in terms of deposits and campaign funds. Perhaps even more ominous is that it slipped below left-wing rivals Reiwa Shinsengumi in the seat totals, which could spell storm clouds on the horizon for Japan’s oldest political party.

* * *

The Winners

The Constitutional Democratic Party

Unsurprisingly, the party with the most to celebrate after this election is the mainstream centre-left opposition, the Constitutional Democratic Party. It added 50 seats to reach 148 in total, which arguably makes it look like a “proper” opposition party for the first since since 2012 – in every prior election, the CDP’s sub-100 seat count made it impossible to present as a credible government-in-waiting. Now, only 43 seats behind the LDP’s total, the party has the numbers to start building towards its ultimate goal of retaking power in a future election.

The deep concern for the CDP, however, is that the opposition benches are much more fragmented than they were when the mainstream opposition party last challenged the LDP for power. Ishin no Kai’s advance may have been halted, but it still holds 38 seats and is ideologically opposed to the CDP on a number of key issues (although they do have more common ground, especially on social issues, than the reductive description of Ishin as a right-wing party might suggest). The Democratic Party for the People, meanwhile, now has 28 seats – and while relations between the parties are likely to improve significantly with Noda Yoshihiko in charge of the CDP, the DPP is also cautiously open to working with the LDP, and the prospects of an actual merger between the two Democratic parties seem even more distant than before.

The one data point that will add a sober note to the CDP’s celebrations today is that the party still has a huge problem with younger voters. Demographics under 50, and especially those in their twenties, lean a little more towards the LDP than older groups, but the real difference is that the CDP’s vote share collapses in these groups, with the DPP instead being their opposition party of choice. The CDP finds itself reliant on older voters for its support, and desperately needs to figure out how to connect with younger demographics if it is to head off the prospect of long-term decline. That might be easier said than done, though; for many voters in these groups, the failure and fall of the DPJ administration (2009-2012) is the most important event of the years in which they formed their political attitudes.

* * *

The Democratic Party for the People

It would have been very easy to write off the DPP before this election. The party was essentially a rump left over after most of its membership merged with the CDP in 2020, with its handful of remaining lawmakers trying to occupy a centrist position between the LDP and the CDP. It was further weakened in 2023 when a number of high-profile members left to form a new party, Free Education For All, which eventually merged with Ishin earlier this month. Only seven members remained ahead of this election.

This morning, the DPP instead has 28 members in the Lower House – a four-fold jump since before the election, making it into the fourth-largest party in the Diet, ahead of Kōmeito. Party leader Tamaki Yuichirō appears to have struck a chord with younger voters in particular – as mentioned above, the DPP is essentially the mainstream opposition party for voters under 50 – with a relentless focus on concrete issues that, he posits, the government can solve easily. The party’s rhetoric can seem at a tangent to other political speech as a consequence; in interviews where other politicians talk in broad terms about ideological goals, Tamaki often instead talks about the need to install air conditioning units in school gymnasiums, or specific changes to the tax code that would remove a “wall” that discourages part-time workers from extending their working hours. The party’s election slogan was equally simple and blunt – 「手取りを増やす」, “We will increase after-tax income”.

The DPP now finds itself in the position of being likely kingmakers in the Diet. Its 28 seats, combined with the LDP and Komeito, would create a governing coalition with 247 seats (including the LDP-unendorsed independents) – enough to get by, but certainly not enough to handle any significant defections or rebellions on any major issues. Tamaki will wish to be cautious with how he plays his hand, however, since cosying up too much to the LDP will undoubtedly hurt the DPP in future elections, and the nature of such a coalition would create a lot of veto points that would likely restrict how much progress could actually be made on the DPP’s preferred policies. A confidence-and-supply arrangement with a minority LDP/Komeito government may be a better solution for the DPP’s needs – but how stable such an arrangement could actually be, especially in a political system not used to such bargaining, is an open question.

* * *

The Fringe Parties

The final winners of this election were, undoubtedly, the fringe parties of both the left and the right. On the left, it may be a little unfair to classify Reiwa Shinsengumi as a fringe party nowadays; with nine seats in the Lower House, and five in the Upper House, it is a not insignificant political group, and most of its policy positions are broadly in line with mainstream social democracy. The most important outcome of this election for Reiwa is that it now outnumbers the JCP in the Lower House, making it the de facto standard bearer for left-wing electoral politics. This is significant not least because there is a notable overlap in the types of activists and voters that are attracted to the JCP and Reiwa, especially in urban areas where both parties rely heavily on young activists for their base; if Reiwa’s star is seen to rise while the JCP’s is seemingly in slow decline, it should get easier for the party to continue to grow that base and attract new recruits. One major challenge, however, is that Reiwa remains essentially a one-man band in terms of its public image, with much of the party’s focus being on leader Yamamoto Tarō. If the party is to grow and develop into a more credible left-wing force, Yamamoto will have to learn to share the spotlight more generously, or risk the party’s fortunes being tied entirely to his somewhat volatile public image.

On the right-wing, there is no question about the classification of the two fringe parties who have found themselves with three Lower House seats apiece after this election. The Conservative Party of Japan (Hoshutō) was founded by author and Abe confidante Hyakuta Naoki largely on the basis of his belief that the LDP had abandoned Abe’s legacy and ideals after his assassination – a belief he shares with the LDP’s conservative wing, but which he clearly thinks needs to be pursued from outside the party rather than within. Hoshutō effectively merged with the political organisation headed by the populist former Mayor of Nagoya, Kawamura Takashi, before this election, with Kawamura winning its only SMD seat in Aichi Prefecture. The party is hardline nationalist and right-wing – traits it shares with Sanseitō, an arguably even more extreme fringe party which also won three seats in this election, adding to the single Upper House seat currently occupied by its leader, Kamiya Sohei. Sanseitō largely originates from anti-vaccine movements during the COVID-19 pandemic, and continues to promote various conspiracy theories about vaccines, food supplies, and what it believes is the deliberate oppression of Japan by shadowy global elites. With both of these parties now represented in the Diet, there is a concern that their viewpoints could be further legitimised in the public eye – giving them a platform far larger than the social media channels they have relied upon thus far to spread their messages.