LDP Suffers Hit in Tokyo Assembly Election, Cedes Top Spot to Tomin First Party
With 127 seats up for grabs in the election, voters punished the LDP for its failure to tackle inflation and its recent financial scandals. After the results were announced, the LDP also endorsed three unaffiliated candidates who won seats.
Meanwhile, Tomin First no Kai reclaimed its place as the largest party in the Tokyo assembly, with its candidates winning 31 seats. The Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan also increased its seat count. The Democratic Party for the People and Sanseito, which previously had no representation in the assembly, both won multiple seats.
The Tokyo assembly election looks certain to affect the House of Councillors election that will soon follow. The race saw 295 candidates, the highest number since the seat count in the Tokyo assembly was set at 127, compete in 42 electoral districts.
The focus of the race was whether the LDP would be able to keep its position as the largest party, and whether a group of political parties supporting Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike — namely the LDP, Tomin First no Kai and Komeito — would maintain its majority.
The LDP did not endorse six members who had served as secretary general of the party caucus in the assembly as they were found to have improperly reported revenue from political fundraising parties. That left the party only endorsing 42 candidates, far fewer than in the previous Tokyo assembly election.
Due in part to deep-seated discontent with the party, over its politics-and-money scandals and its handling of surging prices, all LDP candidates in electoral districts where there was only one seat up for grabs lost their race. After the votes were counted, the party endorsed an unaffiliated candidate who won in a district in Tokyo's southern islands.
'We got poor ratings from the people of Tokyo,' said Shinji Inoue, chairman of the Federation of Tokyo Metropolitan Liberal Democratic Party Branches, on Sunday night.
Tomin First no Kai fielded 37 candidates and played up its close ties with Tokyo's governor, who serves as a special advisor to the regional party.
Thanks to Koike's popularity, the party attracted support from a wide range of voters. It claimed three electoral districts where there was only one seat to win, and also took seats in the districts including Nakano Ward and Kodaira.
Komeito sought to have all its candidates win seats for the ninth consecutive Tokyo assembly election and so narrowed its roster down to 22 candidates, one less than the seats it held before the election was announced. But three of its candidates — two in Ota Ward and one in Shinjuku Ward — failed to secure a spot in the assembly.
However, as Tomin First no Kai was able to grab more seats, the total number held by the parties supporting the governor will assure a majority in the assembly.
The Japanese Communist Party and the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan pushed their criticisms of the LDP's scandals and Koike's management of the Tokyo government. While the CDPJ won 17 seats, the JCP fell to 14, down five from before the election campaign. The DPFP won nine seats in such districts as Katsushika Ward. Sanseito won three.
On Monday, senior members of the LDP and Komeito commented on their poor showings in the election.
LDP Policy Research Council Chairperson Itsunori Onodera said in the morning that the party had not been able to firm up the support it needed. Looking ahead to the upper house election, he said, 'We will tout our economic and other key policies without wavering on our principles.'
At a pre-dawn press conference, Komeito leader Tetsuo Saito said, 'We didn't quite do enough to tout our policies.'
Also on Monday, the Tokyo Metropolitan Election Administration Commission announced that 47.59% of voters turned out for the election. That was up by 5.2 percentage points from the last Tokyo assembly election in 2021, when voter turnout hit its second-lowest point on record.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yomiuri Shimbun
4 hours ago
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Japan's LDP Mulls Timing, Method of Party Presidential Election to Select Ishiba's Successor
The timing of when Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba announces his resignation and when that resignation goes into effect will impact when and in what way the Liberal Democratic Party, of which he is president, will hold an election to choose his successor. Several LDP members have called for a swift resignation announcement by Ishiba and holding of a presidential election. 'The longer the prime minister stays in office, the more we will lose support for the party,' a mid-ranking LDP member said. However, a politically quiet setting is desirable as for instance, the nation will observe the anniversary of the end of World War II on Aug. 15. Opinions are divided therefore on the specifics of the ideal schedule of events. A proposal has been floated among LDP executive members to hold the vote in September and convene an extraordinary session of the Diet for the prime ministerial election in October. This assumes that Ishiba stays in office until the Ninth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD 9) scheduled for Aug. 20-22, which is the main diplomatic event in August. Considering that the LDP-Komeito ruling coalition holds a minority in both the House of Representatives and House of Councillors, a senior LDP member said, 'we need to set aside enough time to confirm that non-ruling party forces will not unite in the prime ministerial election to replace the government.' Attention is also being paid to how the LDP presidential election will be conducted. According to LDP regulations, the party president can be chosen at a joint plenary meeting of LDP members of both houses of the Diet 'in cases of particular urgency' as the president is unable to fulfill their term. Each LDP member in the Diet can cast one vote and each prefectural chapter three votes, increasing the weight of legislators' votes in this election format. However, if there is sufficient time after Ishiba's resignation announcement, there may be increasing calls for the LDP presidential election held in a 'complete form' that gives party members voting parity with Diet members. In the LDP's presidential election in September last year, former economic security minister Sanae Takaichi came out on top in the votes cast by rank-and-file members in the first round of voting. Lawmakers and others supporting Takaichi argued that the next presidential election should be conducted in the complete form to 'listen to the voices of party members, given the party's critical situation.' On the other hand, some LDP executives who are wary of Takaichi's hard-line conservative stance are believed to be aiming to for a general meeting of LDP lawmakers from both houses of the Diet as the way to select the new party president.
Yomiuri Shimbun
9 hours ago
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Ishiba Weighs Timing of Resignation Amid Revolt in LDP; Prime Minister Seeks to Minimize Political Disruption
With Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba having decided to resign, the focus has now shifted to when he will make it official. Ishiba plans to choose a moment that will minimize disruption to key political events — reaching a formal agreement in Japan-U.S. tariff negotiations, an upcoming extraordinary Diet session, and the leadership race for the Liberal Democratic Party, of which Ishiba is president. But with the 'Down with Ishiba' movement showing no signs of easing, the window for the prime minister to decide on his own is steadily shrinking. Fears of being a lame duck 'The tariff talks concern the national interest. I'm counting on [economic revitalization minister Ryosei] Akazawa,' Ishiba confided to those around him on Tuesday night, the eve of the tariff deal. 'Once the tariff negotiations show prospects [of reaching a deal], I'll explain how I will take responsibility, but I can't publicly say 'I'm quitting' yet.' In the final days of the upper house election campaign, it became clear that the ruling bloc was struggling. Ishiba was prepared to resign if the ruling LDP–Komeito coalition failed to maintain a majority. Although they fell short of their target of 50 seats, winning 47, he judged the setback to be survivable and decided — for the moment — to stay on. Even so, Ishiba never intended to cling to power. On election day Sunday, he told close aides, 'It would be alright to lay out a roadmap and hand the post to the next person.' But he also worried that announcing his departure during talks with Washington would brand him a lame duck, weakening Japan's bargaining position. Timing hinges on political calendar Ishiba's plan was to assess the outcome of the Japan-U.S. talks, his most pressing issue, and then finalize the timing of his announcement. But because he shared this plan with only a very small circle, there was a backlash within the LDP, with many perceiving Ishiba's actions as an attempt to hold onto power indefinitely. On Tuesday, lawmakers demanding his resignation launched a petition drive calling for the party leadership election to be brought forward, making the 'Down with Ishiba' drive explicit. Even local LDP chapters — Ishiba's power base — joined the calls for him to go. Fearing that wobbly footing would sap Japan's bargaining power with the United States, Ishiba asked three former prime ministers — Fumio Kishida, Yoshihide Suga, and Taro Aso — to meet on Wednesday and help calm the waters. He planned to tell them he would clarify his future once certain results have been achieved, believing the former leaders would understand. After the talks he denied he would resign immediately, but one Cabinet member remarked, 'He just can't say it yet; this wasn't a pledge to stay.' Reading The Yomiuri Shimbun on Wednesday morning, which reported 'Decision on resignation [to be made] soon after seeing the progress of the tariff talks,' Ishiba murmured, 'A deal has been reached with the U.S., but my thinking [on resignation] hasn't changed. I hope this quiets the party.' After receiving news of the Japan-U.S. agreement from Akazawa, Ishiba told reporters at the Prime Minister's Office, 'With the negotiation outcome in hand, the question now is what decision I should make,' hinting at his own future. Yet Ishiba believed he had to delay any announcement until a formal, signed document was exchanged by the two governments. If a summit with U.S. President Donald Trump could be arranged, he hoped to postpone it even further. Because the ruling bloc is now a minority in both chambers, an early resignation could prompt the opposition to demand a prime-ministerial vote during the extraordinary Diet session slated to start Aug 1. Marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, Ishiba, who is considering a review of the war, also wishes to remain prime minister through Aug. 15. Party sentiment is far from sympathetic. On Wednesday, the LDP leadership moved up to July 28 a joint caucus to hear opinions from members regarding the upper house election results. A former minister who maintains distance from Ishiba warned, 'If he doesn't announce his resignation at the very start of that meeting, the 'Down with Ishiba' movement will finish him.'
a day ago
Sanseitō Makes a Splash: Populist Politics on the Rise in Japan
The July 20 election for Japan's House of Councillors saw 125 of the chamber's 248 seats up for grabs—half the total plus one vacant seat to be filled. The stakes, though, were higher than suggested by the numbers. When the dust had cleared, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party had secured just 39 of the seats being decided—a slightly higher number than their all-time low of 36 seats in 1989, but still a drubbing that left it with 13 fewer seats than before the election took place. The LDP's junior coalition partner Kōmeitō, meanwhile, lost 6 seats from its preelection total, winning just 8, in part due to the rapid dwindling and aging of the membership of the religious group Sōka Gakkai, which provides the bulk of its support. The LDP-Kōmeitō coalition holds 75 of the upper house seats that were not up for election this time, meaning that the parties had to achieve Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru's modest target of 50 combined wins to maintain their majority hold on power in the chamber. Their record of 47 fell short of the mark, though, leaving them in a diminished position in the House of Councillors as well as the House of Representatives, where they became a minority government following the October 2024 general election. The LDP, which celebrates the seventieth anniversary of its founding in November this year, has never in all that time been a member of a minority government in both houses of the Diet until now. This means Japanese politics has entered uncharted territory. Following a spate of political money scandals up through the early 1990s, Japan sought to refresh the scene by shifting in 1994 from an electoral system of multimember districts to one with a combination of single-seat districts and proportional-representation bloc voting. The aim was to achieve a framework supporting two powerful parties that could wrest power from one another as the political winds shifted. This represented a break from the previous reality, where any problems that might crop up could be done away with by replacing one set of LDP leaders with another, in an ersatz form of regime change. And it did, in fact, eventually lead to a different group, the Democratic Party of Japan, stepping up to take the reins of power in 2009. The 1994 reforms, though, left the House of Councillors largely untouched. Popularly considered less important than the powerful House of Representatives, this upper house had long offered less to voters in the way of meaningful actions on which to base voting decisions, and its actions in the political sphere tended to be swayed by the popular mood of the time. This introduced a degree of unpredictability, and there were numerous cases where prime ministers were pressed to step down following unexpected electoral shifts in House of Councillors contests. This month's election may end up in this category. Generally speaking, though, the natural way of things is for a ruling party that has fallen out of favor with the electorate to see its seats go to an opposition party, which gains influence in its place. This time, though, we have seen no simple transfer of seats from the LDP to an alternative: Rather, the anti-LDP vote has been split across numerous options, producing a crowded field of diverse opposition forces. Two opposition parties making marked gains in the July 20 election are the DPFP, or Democratic Party for the People, which won 17 seats to bring its total in the upper house to 22 (up from 9), and the Sanseitō, which took 14 seats to bring its total to 15, up from just 2. The largest opposition party in the chamber, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, saw no change in its total seats, winning 22 seats to stay at 38. On paper these parties would seem to have the numbers to make an impact as a unified opposition, but politically speaking they range from the DPFP and Sanseitō on the right to the CDPJ on the left, leaving little room for cooperation. The stage is therefore set for fluid, unpredictable dealings on both the minority ruling and fractured opposition sides of the aisle. Going to Extremes? Many expected Sanseitō to be little more than a flash in the pan going into this election. But even as it trotted out its exclusionary 'Japanese first' slogan, the party was running relatively unknown candidates in districts across the nation, and placing them near the top in the voting in many of them. This signals a turning point in Japanese politics, I believe. If we are to describe the 2025 upper house election as 'historic' in some way, it will likely be not because it saw a sound defeat for the ruling LDP, but because it marked the serious rise of right-wing populist forces in Japan, a trend seen in various Western nations in recent years. Kamiya Sōhei, Sanseitō's leader, founded the party in 2020. Prior to that he had served in the Suita municipal assembly in Osaka Prefecture and unsuccessfully run for seats in the National Diet (with LDP backing) and the Osaka Prefectural Assembly. His political career languished until he began building a name for himself online, with antivaccination screeds on his YouTube channel. In the 2022 House of Councillors election he rode this momentum to a seat in the Diet, gaining the first foothold for his new party. At its core, Sanseitō is a nationalist, restorationist political force on the far right of Japan's political spectrum. In May this year it released its draft of a 'New Constitution of Japan,' defining the state as one in which the emperor reigns over a unified polity of the imperial house and the people. The document also lists 'the spirit of cherishing Japan' as one requirement for the people, and can be read as allowing for the stripping of citizenship from those who fail in this regard. The Sanseitō draft constitution further demands that the people honor the Imperial Rescript on Education, promulgated in 1890 by Emperor Meiji, and goes so far as to position the cultivation of rice, 'Japan's staple food,' as a central part of food policy. In its clause commanding media organizations to fulfill their duty to 'report on national policy fairly and without bias,' it comes across as little different from basic laws seen in authoritarian states like China or Russia. The Sanseitō candidate Saya, a jazz vocalist who goes by a single name, came in second in the July 20 election in the Tokyo district, winning her seat with some 670,000 votes. She was formerly one of the 'Tamogami girls,' high-profile supporters of Tamogami Toshio, who made a foray into politics after his 2008 dismissal as chief of staff of the Air Self-Defense Force for publishing an essay claiming that Japan was not an aggressor, but had been tricked into fighting in World War II by the Chinese and Americans. On July 3, soon after campaigning kicked off, Saya appeared on an Internet broadcast where she stated that arming itself with nuclear weapons would be 'the cheapest way for Japan to defend itself' going forward. Russian Influence Comes to Japan at Last Sanseitō has staked out a series of extremist positions, as outlined above, gaining rapidly rising levels of attention for them via its use of social media. During the election period, this even led to accusations that the party had support from Russian information operations after Saya appeared in a program broadcast by the Japanese edition of Sputnik, the Russian state-operated online news channel. The European Union has suspended broadcasting activities by Sputnik in EU territories, describing it as a propaganda outlet. Foreign information manipulation and interference, or FIMI, has been noted in Japan's White Paper on Defense as a potential threat to the integrity of the country's elections. FIMI was recognized as a factor as long ago as 2016 in Britain's Brexit referendum and the US presidential election that sent Donald Trump to the White House for the first time. Now, nine years later, its impact appears to have reached Japan as well. Analysts have explained Sanseitō's success as due in part to its ability to peel off the LDP's 'bedrock conservatives' who once supported Prime Minister Abe Shinzō when he headed the party. While this has no doubt played a part, it pales in comparison to the larger issues of rising consumer prices, stagnant wages, and the perceived ineptitude of Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru. Without these factors in play, there would have been no boom in popularity for Sanseitō. According to the Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions released by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare on July 4, fully 28.0% of households reported 'very difficult' conditions this year, a rise of 1.5 percentage points from the 2024 survey. Indeed, Japan's rate of inflation rests near the highest level among all developed economies. For the people of Japan who sense their standard of living in decline—particularly those under age 40 in more precarious career positions—this malaise has been paired with the sight of constantly growing crowds of free-spending foreign tourists and news on wealthy overseas investors buying up real estate in Japan. Sanseitō's 'Japanese first' messaging has tapped into this discomfort, creating a chemical reaction of sorts that boosted the party's fortunes in the upper house election. Politics that aims at pressure points like these can be described as little other than populism. Rising prices in Japan can largely be ascribed to the policies of Abenomics, which reduced the value of the yen on exchange markets. But there is no debate that looks squarely at this underlying reason. And meanwhile, we see Sanseitō attracting crowds estimated upward of 20,000 to its final campaign rally in the Tokyo city center earlier this month. Late in the evening on election day, Prime Minister Ishiba noted his intention to remain in office, fulfilling his duty as head of the largest party in the House of Councillors, a status his LDP did manage to hold on to despite its drubbing. Even if his party rejects this course and decides to hold a presidential election to replace him as party head, there is no guarantee that the new president will be duly selected by the Diet as the next prime minister, though. And whether it is Ishiba or someone new in office, he will face the same dismal reality of a ruling coalition without a majority of seats in either of the Diet's chambers. The upshot? Japan is in for a prolonged period of aimless political drifting, with no clear way out. (Originally published in Japanese on July 21, 2025. Banner photo: Sanseitō leader Kamiya Sōhei speaks to journalists in Shinjuku, Tokyo, on July 20, 2025, as the day's election results come in. © Jiji.)
