In her third attempt, Sanae Takaichi won the Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) leadership in convincing and comfortable fashion in a runoff against Shinjiro Koizumi, winning 185 votes to Koizumi’s 156.
One lawmaker apparently abstained. She won by a larger margin than Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru won in 2024, when he bested Takaichi by only 21 votes.
It will take some time to process the significance and implications of what marks a decisive shift in favor of the LDP right but it can be useful to assess the immediate winners and losers – domestically, at least – in the wake of Takaichi’s upset.
Takaichi is, of course, the biggest winner.
Throughout the campaign, she appeared to be getting little traction against Koizumi, who appeared to be amassing a sizable edge with LDP lawmakers and holding his own against Takaichi when it came to support from the LDP’s rank-and-file members. However, the opinion polling significantly under-reported her support from rank-and-file members, which reached 40.4% compared with Koizumi’s 27.4%.
Her support was not only greater than expected but it was also distributed across the country; she topped Koizumi in 36 of 47 prefectures. Had Koizumi performed better in more places – splitting the prefectures, for example – it is possible that the outcome would look different.
In the end, her grassroots support, which was her source of strength in previous leadership bids, made it difficult for the parliamentary party to deny her the opportunity to remake it in a more ideological fashion.
Koizumi, meanwhile, is naturally the biggest loser.
In contrast to last year, when his grassroots support wilted during the campaign and ruined his chances, it appeared that Koizumi had overcome that challenge despite several reports on his campaign’s conduct that proved embarrassing for the candidate.
He had largely held steady in opinion polling, which suggested that the race between Koizumi and Takaichi would be close. It also appeared that he had an overwhelming advantage with the parliamentary party. Surveys showing that Koizumi would receive the support of eighty lawmakers were accurate – but that turned out to be Koizumi’s ceiling, whereas Takaichi significantly narrowed the gap in the first round.
Of the 150 lawmakers who voted for the bottom three candidates in the first round, only 65 switched to Koizumi, meaning that Koizumi’s gains were, among other things, smaller than the 72 lawmaker votes Yoshimasa Hayashi won in the first round. To win, Koizumi needed to add all of Hayashi’s votes plus another ten from Takayuki Kobayashi or Toshimitsu Motegi, particularly to compensate for his under-performance in the prefectures.
This defeat is by no means the end of Koizumi’s career – he is still only 44, after all – but it may be a bigger setback than the one he experienced in 2024, given the widespread expectations that he would win.
For the LDP, Takaichi’s victory is a mixed bag.
On the one hand, she may be poised to compete with Sanseitō and the Democratic Party for the People (DPFP) for the younger, conservative, urban, male voters who have abandoned the LDP.
On the other hand, she could break the LDP’s quarter-century-old coalition with Komeito, which, despite the decline of Komeito’s machine has still been an important source of votes for LDP’s candidates; she could alienate independents and the party’s older, more moderate base (Ishiba voters, in other words); and she could exacerbate divisions within the party.
We will have to see whether she uses her party leadership team and cabinet to unify the party and make peace with rivals, but she will have to work at peacemaking within the party.
That said, her victory will likely give a boost to Taro Aso, the party’s last formal faction boss, who reportedly said he would support the candidate who won the most popular votes in the first round.
The remnants of the former Abe faction, despite their slush fund scandal may find themselves wielding greater influence than they have in several years. Also, DPFP Toshimitsu Motegi may emerge in an important role in a Takaichi government.
Turning to the other parties, on balance Takaichi’s victory is likely a defeat for the Democratic Party for the People and for Sanseito, which clearly are competing for the same voters as Takaichi and will now have to determine how to position themselves in competition with a Takaichi-led LDP trying to outbid them instead of a Shigeru Ishiba-led or Koizumi-led LDP that could serve as a foil.
Both may try to work with the LDP now on common priorities – issues related to Japan’s foreign population, for example – but the momentum they had coming out of the upper house elections may be diminished. Of course, Takaichi’s victory is perhaps a larger victory for both parties to the extent that it confirms that they have identified an under-represented voter bloc that could be the key to electoral victories – and, in Sanseito’s case, identified an issue that many voters clearly felt needed to be addressed more.
At the same time, Takaichi’s victory may be a victory for Ishin no Kai, in the sense that while the party seemed prepared to work with Koizumi, it seems prepared to negotiate with Takaichi too – and if Takaichi were to break the coalition with Komeito, it could give Ishin no Kai even greater leverage in coalition talks.
That said, Ishin would have even more leverage if three of its lower-house members had not just left the party, reducing its seat total from 38 – which, together with the LDP’s 196 would make a majority – to 35, two seats short.
Komeito
For Komeito, Takaichi’s victory is unquestionably a defeat in that it could bring the coalition with the LDP to a breaking point.
While Komeito leader Tetsuo Saito denied that he was explicitly threatening to leave the coalition if Takaichi or Kobayashi won, his remarks before the start of the campaign reflect the growing recognition that, although there are multiple reasons for the decline in the party’s electoral strength, Komeito could be paying a price for its partnership with the LDP.
In contrast to the second Abe administration – when party leader Natsuo Yamaguchi boasted that Komeito was serving as a brake on some of Abe’s more radical impulses even as the party also compromised on some fundamental issues – there may be less of an appetite among the party’s supporters for the kinds of compromises that joining a Takaichi government would entail compared with 2012.
Takaichi, meanwhile, may not be interested in relying on a party that consciously sees itself as a check on her ambitions. It has been unthinkable that Komeito would leave government, but it may be more thinkable now than ever – and if Komeito is not in government, it is not immediately clear what role it would play instead.
Finally, it is possible that Takaichi’s victory could be good news for Yoshihiko Noda and his Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP). The CDP has undoubtedly been floundering, having failed to gain any seats in the July upper house elections. However, a Takaichi-led LDP could be a better foil for moderate conservative Noda than an Ishiba or Koizumi-led LDP. The CDP has been looking for an identity; Takaichi may give it one.
Left-wing parties both old (the Japanese Communist Party) and new (Reiwa Shinsengumi) could benefit from a Takaichi government for similar reasons.
There will be much more to say about Takaichi’s victory and its implications, but as this suggests, it immediately scrambles the calculations of actors across the political system.
Longtime Japan politics and policymaking analyst Tobias Harris heads Japan Foresight LLC. This article was originally published on his Substack newsletter Observing Japan. It is republished with permission.
AloJapan.com