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Japanese Politics - 2024 Election

The next national election was due by 2025, unless Japanese Prime Minister Kishida called for a snap election. A newly revised public offices election law that redrew Lower House single-seat constituency boundaries went into effect on 28 December 2022. The LDP was expected to face difficulties making adjustments in fielding candidates as it had many incumbent Lower House members in prefectures subject to seat reductions under the reform.

When the LDP won the House of Councillors election in July 2022, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was said to have obtained "golden three years" with no national elections unless Kishida himself dissolved the diet for a snap election. This would allow them to sit down and work on mid- and long-term policies. However, due to the questions surrounding money in politics, politics and religion, and the resignation of cabinet ministers one after another, polls showed a continuous decline in the Cabinet approval rating.

Prime Minister Kishida Fumio’s term as LDP president concluded at the end of September 2024, before the term of current lower house lawmakers expires in October 2025. The next Upper House election was scheduled for the summer of 2025. The four-year terms for Lower House members expire in October of that year unless a prime minister chose to dissolve the chamber under a provision of the Constitution.

Japan has a parliamentary government with a constitutional monarchy. In November 2021, Kishida Fumio, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, was confirmed as prime minister. International observers assessed elections to the Upper House of the Diet on July 10, which the Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner, Komeito, won with a majority of seats, as free and fair.

Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: significant barriers to accessing reproductive health services; and crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting persons with disabilities, members of national/racial/ ethnic minority groups, or Indigenous peoples.

Prisoners presented chilblains-affected fingers and toes of varying severity, from long-term exposure to cold in unheated cells in the winter. Meal sizes were often considered insufficient, leading to significant weight loss, according to independent observers. Prisons and detention centers routinely held prisoners and detainees alone in their cells for extended periods.

The government continued to deny death row inmates advance information about the date of execution until the day the sentence was to be carried out. The government notified family members of executions after the fact. The government held that this policy spared prisoners the anguish of knowing when they were going to die. Authorities by law hold prisoners condemned to death in solitary confinement until their execution but allowed visits by family, lawyers, and others. The length of such solitary confinement varied from case to case and may extend for several years.

Bail is not available prior to indictment. While confession was not a legal requirement for bail, NGOs and legal experts stated bail was very difficult to obtain without a confession. Other elements of arrest and pretrial detention practices (see below) also tended to encourage confessions. The Public Prosecutors Office reported that approximately 67 percent of all criminal suspects who were referred to prosecutors by police did not face indictment. Prosecutors indicted the remaining approximately 33 percent, of whom nearly all were convicted. In most of these cases, suspects had confessed.

On 11 July 2022, lawyers filed lawsuits in 14 high courts and their branches around the country seeking to nullify the results of the Upper House election in all 45 electoral districts, a regular post-election occurrence. The lawyers stated that the disparity in the weight of a single vote between the most and least populated electoral districts was unconstitutionally wide. In November 2022 the High Court in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, was the first to rule that the vote weight disparity was unconstitutional but it stopped short of nullifying the election results in five northeastern constituencies. As of November, a Supreme Court decision was pending. In a similar lawsuit, the Supreme Court decided in June 2022 to take on a 2021 Lower House election challenge.

Kishida had called for tax hikes of ¥1 trillion by fiscal 2027 to pay for Japan’s massive defense buildup. The government and the ruling parties are considering raising the corporate and tobacco taxes in stages from fiscal 2024 or later. They are also weighing a plan to adapt a special tax that was originally designed to finance reconstruction for areas affected by the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.

Koichi Hagiuda, chairperson of the Liberal Democratic Party’s Policy Research Council, had repeatedly urged the dissolution of the lower house for a general election before the Diet votes on tax hikes to cover an increased defense budget. “When we have asked the people to pay new taxes in the past, we always got their consent through elections. We need to do so this time as a matter of course,” he said on a Jan. 31 internet broadcast.

In late April, some media polls showed the Kishida Cabinet’s approval ratings had recovered to around 50%. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party, headed by Kishida, won four of the five seats in parliament up for grabs in by-elections on 23 April 2023, as voters appear to have given high marks to his diplomatic efforts, such as improving ties with South Korea and a surprise visit to Ukraine.

Nippon Ishin no Kai, the Japan Innovation Party, viewed as the true winner in a series of elections in April 2023, including local polls. The party is keen to become the main opposition force in the next general election. Its secretary general, Fumitake Fujita, has pledged to field candidates in all 289 electoral districts. Growing momentum behind Nippon Ishin no Kai, a party ideologically close to the LDP and currently the third-largest force in parliament, triggered alarm within the ruling party.

The prime minister said that he wasn’t thinking about dissolving the Lower House. “As we have to carry out important policies one by one, I am not considering (a Lower House) dissolution and a general election at the moment,” Kishida told reporters at the Prime Minister’s Office in Tokyo. Kishida told reporters 15 June 2023 that he will not dissolve the Lower House during the current parliament session.

He said the mission of the Kishida administration is to produce solutions to issues that cannot be postponed, and that he has repeatedly affirmed this stance. Kishida said the administration has to tackle an increasingly complicated international situation, and take measures to achieve wage hikes in a sustainable way. He added that his administration must also move forward with other issues, such as implementing action plans it decided on this week to support children and child-rearing households.

A combination of factors may have contributed to this suprpse decision. He faced fraught relationship with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s coalition partner Komeito. Opinion polls conducted the previous weekend indicated a small downturn in the Cabinet’s approval ratings, A series of controversies faced the Kishida administration, following Kishida’s the dismissal of his eldest son as political secretary and Kishida's poor handling of his son’s involvement in a minor scandal. And there were a spate of troubles around the My Number identification card strongly championed by the government.

The public was opposed to a snap vote, as the LDP had struggled to find a valid rationale for it. Polls showed that the public was against an early general election. A Kyodo News poll conducted in late May 2023 showed that over 60% of respondents opposed a snap poll during the ongoing session of parliament.

As the ongoing session of parliament drew to a close in late June 2024, the next chance for Kishida to seek a fresh mandate from the public would be in the fall, when a potential victory in the polls could secure Kishida’s position ahead of the LDP presidential election scheduled for September 2024.

The snap election 27 October 2024 had a profound impact on Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba's ruling coalition as it lost its parliamentary majority. Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba's ruling coalition lost the majority of seats it previously had. That's the first time in 15 years the Liberal Democratic Party and its junior coalition partner party Komeito have lost the majority after briefly losing power in 2009.

The coalition earned just 215 seats out of 465 in Japan's Lower House, 18 short of the 233 seats needed for a majority. Ahead of the elections, the coalition had a stable majority of 279 seats, while the LDP alone had 247. The main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan won 148 seats, up from 98 before the election. The LDP's extensive financial scandal in late 2023 and increasing living costs are major factors behind falling public support. While especially attacking the ruling party with the money scandal, the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan gained a significant number of seats, going from 98 to 148. The leader of the main opposition party Yoshihiko Noda said the loss by the LDP-Komeito coalition was a "huge achievement," saying the country is "on the eve of a change of government."

Concerns of political uncertainties rose after Ishiba "gambled" on calling a snap election to bolster his position as soon as being freshly minted as Prime Minister this month. Pundits said the administration may struggle to form a government and also say that Ishiba's position was in jeopardy unless he brought the cabinet popularity back up in time for the House of Councillors election held in July next year. In order to remain in power, the LDP could try to bring other parties to its coalition, or simply try to rule through a minority government and focus on domestic issues. Pundits also predicted that, due to the election outcome, the ruling party will not be able to make bold decisions.

For the upstart Democratic Party for the People, its so-called "policy-centric approach" lead to them quadrupling their seats and vaulted it into the role of potential 'kingmaker'. The LDP and Komeito aim to maintain the coalition government with no immediate plans of expanding it to include other parties. Rather, the LDP is planning on making arrangements to foster a working relationship with other parties so its leader Ishiba Shigeru wins the nomination to remain prime minister. The Constitutional Democratic Party plans to ask other opposition parties for their cooperation to vote for party leader Noda Yoshihiko.

The Democratic Party for the People was created out of a merger between the Democratic Party and the Party of Hope. However, the party split two years later, with more than half of its members joining the Constitutional Democratic Party. The 10 remaining members stayed resolute and shaped the current DPFP under the stewardship of party leader Tamaki Yuichiro. amaki credited the party's success in the election to its stance of valuing "solutions over confrontation" and its "policy-centric approach." He also declined joining the ruling coalition. "What we want is not cabinet posts but the realization of the economic policies that the party promised in the election, such as increasing take-home pay and enriching the lives of the people," he said.