Japanese Politics 2025

 

2025: The Year of Conservative Resurgence

By Takuya Nishimura

Senior Fellow, Asia Policy Point

You can find his blog, J Update here.

December 30, 2025

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has survived her first Diet session. She was able to enact her economic stimulus plan with the help of her party’s coalition partner, the Japan Innovation Party (JIP). Despite her naïve and careless statement on a possible “Taiwan contingency,” her cabinet maintains a high approval rating. The current success of her big government and strong national security platform bolsters her conservative agenda. It is possible that 2025 will be remembered as the year when Japan’s conservative nationalists regained political power, driven by populism and global uncertainty.

The big political news of 2025 was Takaichi’s October inauguration. The July Upper House election signaled her forthcoming victory in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) presidential race. In the July election, the ruling LDP and its coalition partner, Komeito, suffered a serious setback when the major opposition parties, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDPJ) and the Japan Innovation Party (JIP), failed to win over voters who had left the LDP. Instead, two more radical groups, the Democratic Party for the People (DPP) and a new populist party, Sanseito, showed a remarkable surge in the election.

Former prime minister Taro Aso was one of the people who realized how serious the July election defeat was. Although he had reluctantly but openly supported then Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Aso led a behind-the-scenes movement in the LDP to replace Ishiba over the summer. Although Ishiba had no hope of staying in power, having lost both the Lower House election in 2024 and the Upper House election in 2025, LDP lawmakers speculated at the time that someone close to Ishiba, such as Shinjiro Koizumi or Yoshimasa Hayashi, would succeed him.

The LDP lawmakers in Tokyo did not appreciate that LDP local organizations had far more serious reservations about the situation. The local perception was that populist and conservative movements had eroded the political basis of the LDP. The DPP gained votes in the Upper House election on a platform of increasing voters’ take-home pay.  Sanseito campaigned on a different but equally popular policy: stricter measures against foreigners, which appealed to xenophobia among some Japanese. These policies attracted swing voters who were skeptical of the LDP’s leadership.

The July results set the stage for the LDP presidential election in October. Takaichi’s conservative nationalist and populist agenda proved attractive to the local LDP constituencies rocked by the loss of their traditional base. Aso also instructed his faction colleagues to vote for the candidate with the strongest support among the local branches of the party. This proved to be Takaichi.

Although Aso had wanted a more centralist prime minister beholding to him, he accepted her ascendancy. She had long positioned herself among the more extreme and vocal right wingers. Frankly, Aso’s views are not distant from hers, as he shares a belief that a stable administration leans on conservative groups, just like former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did. As deputy prime minister in 2013, he suggested that the LDP in its discussions for constitutional change “should learn from the tactics of the Nazi regime that silently changed the Weimar Constitution” so to avoid protests. Although he retracted the statement, he maintains the need for decisive leadership and backroom decision making outside public scrutiny.

Takaichi’s victory is an epoch-making shift in LDP’s course from liberal centrist to conservative nationalist government. After the death of Abe, the LDP had gradually moved to the liberal side. Abe’s successor, Fumio Kishida, improved Japan’s relationship with the Republic of Korea and imposed heavy punishments on lawmakers with the now-former Abe faction in the kickback fund scandal. The faction was considered quite conversative nationalist.

Kishida’s successor, Shigeru Ishiba, long a political foe of Abe, tried to restore relations with China, which had deteriorated under Abe. Ishiba appealed to Beijing by repeatedly demonstrating his respect for his mentor, former prime minister Kakuei Tanaka who normalized the relations with China in 1972. Ishiba also took a major step toward restoring Japan’s historic war apology by including “remorse” in his address at the 80^th national memorial ceremony for the war dead on August 15, 2025.

Takaichi’s rise to LDP leadership has reversed much of the work of the Kishida and Ishiba administrations. She has unhesitatingly returned Japan to Abe’s political agenda. She supports a revisionist history of the War in the Pacific, believes that Japan has apologized enough for the War, and promotes a prime minister visiting the Yasukuni Shrine to honor some of Japan’s war dead, including hanged war criminals.

This approach took its toll when the LDP lost Komeito as a coalition partner immediately after Takaichi took office as LDP president. Komeito’s leadership had been under pressure from its local branches, which were suffering from a conservative upsurge that included the LDP. Komeito had to choose between its values and Takaichi’s LDP.

Komeito’s departure pushed the LDP further to the right. Takaichi chose to form a coalition with JIP, after failing with the DPP. The LDP and JIP have memorialized a conservative agenda in their coalition agreement. This includes imperial succession in the male line only, amendment of the constitutional provision on the Self-Defense Forces, and the continued official use of maiden names rather than a selective separate surname system.  

Although it was her third bid for the prime ministership, it was obvious that Takaichi was not ready for leadership and too uncritical of Abe’s policies. Believing that Abe’s economic policy had had underwritten his conservative agenda, Takaichi undertook a major fiscal mobilization in the FY2025 supplemental budget and in the draft of the FY2026 main budget to create a “strong economy.” The budgets rely on the issuance of a large amount of government bonds, even though it is increasing tax revenue that drives expenditures in the budget.

Increasing government bonds may be a plan at odds with the Bank of Japan’s (BOJ) monetary policy. The BOJ has been raising the interest rate steadily since July 2024, which reduces the price on government bonds. Increasing bond issuances to support Takaichi’s large-scale spendings would be an increasingly expensive undertaking. Put another way, while the BOJ is shrinking the money supply, Takaichi is expanding government spending. The market has responded to this prospect by hitting Takaichi with a triple low in stocks, bonds and the Japanese yen.

Relations with China have also suffered an unforced error on Takaichi’s part. Apparently disregarding how delicately Kishida and Ishiba had handled China policy, Takaichi decided to raise in public discussions in the Diet the prospect of a “Taiwan contingency” – the notion that Chinese aggression against Taiwan would trigger Japan’s self-defense authority. China reacted furiously, claiming that Takaichi’s comment was a Japanese intervention in a Chinese domestic issue.

It was later revealed that Takaichi had not sought any meaningful staff input. She has argued that her comment did not deviate from the stance of her predecessors. She has refused to retract her comment, leading to increasingly strident statements and actions by China. A recent comment by one of Takaichi’s special policy advisers, Oue Sadamasa, suggesting that Japan should possess nuclear weapons, acerbated the tension.

Nevertheless, the Japanee people still support Takaichi. A poll showed a 65 percent approval rating for the Takaichi Cabinet in November. Fifty percent of the respondents had no concerns about Takaichi’s comment on the Taiwan contingency, while only 25 percent thought it problematic.

The Takaichi administration has quickly gained a measure of stability. The LDP-JIP coalition secured a simple majority in the House of Representatives by adding three lawmakers to their coalition. Although there appears to be no room for error, the LDP has cleared a major hurdle with the JIP. 

Yet, the LDP failed to pass a bill to reduce seats in the Lower House. The JIP had made seat reduction an “absolute condition” for its participation in the coalition. But even with this failure, the JIP has shown no signs of leaving the coalition, apparently finding that continuing cooperation with the LDP is the best way to promote JIP policies.

The opposition parties are so fragmented that they cannot put effective pressure on the Takaichi administration. In fact, the DPP and Komeito voted for Takaichi’s supplemental budget bill because Takaichi included policies in her economic stimulus plan that the two parties supported.

Further, uninterested in cooperating with the CDPJ, the DPP looks willing to join the LDP-JIP coalition. Takaichi has promised to raise the income tax threshold to 1.78 million yen of annual income, an action that the DPP strongly supports. (Households with lower incomes would pay no income tax.) For its part, the CDPJ dropped the option of a no-confidence resolution against the Takaichi Cabinet. Such a proposal has always been the strongest weapon for the opposition parties to protest the government. The CDPJ’s withdrawal of the resolution, five days before the end of the Diet session, indicates the party’s weakness.

While the opposition parties  are trying to find an effective line of attack on the Takaichi administration,  the two-month-old seemingly populist and conservative nationalist government is  shaping up for a long rule