Japan’s prime minister rarely leaves office by losing a general election. The job belongs to whoever leads the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and the party can pull that support the moment a leader’s poll numbers or a scandal make them a liability. Five people have held the post within five years: Shinzo Abe, Yoshihide Suga, Fumio Kishida, Shigeru Ishiba and Sanae Takaichi.
Two national elections fell in that period, and neither winner completed a term. Each change of leader happened inside the party, between elections, decided by a much smaller electorate than the one the country votes in.
The vote that actually picks the leader
Japan’s prime minister needs a parliamentary vote, and the LDP has ruled almost without a break for seven decades. Its own internal leadership contest is the vote that matters. Whoever wins that contest is almost certain to become prime minister. A leader can fall from power without a single voter having a say, simply by losing the backing of their own party.
Five departures, five different triggers
Abe stepped down in 2020 for health reasons. Suga took over, and lasted barely a year before resigning as his approval ratings collapsed.
Kishida followed, winning a national election in late 2021, only for his popularity to fall away under the weight of a party funding scandal, rising living costs and a sliding yen. Ishiba replaced him in 2024 and called a snap election within days of taking office, a gamble that cost the LDP its worst result in more than a decade and its majority in the lower house.
Ishiba then lost the upper house too, in a mid-term election earlier in 2025, leaving the government without a majority in either chamber. He resigned in September 2025, after less than a year in the role.
Stepping down before the party forces the issue
Ishiba’s resignation was not forced by a public vote. It came a day before LDP opponents were expected to vote him out themselves. Tomohiko Taniguchi, a professor at the University of Tsukuba and a former adviser to Abe, said pressure had been building inside the party for Ishiba to take responsibility, and that “the writing was on the wall.” Rather than face that internal vote, he chose to go first.
A coalition partner walked out after 26 years
Takaichi inherited a party already short of allies. Komeito, the LDP’s coalition partner for 26 years, ended the arrangement immediately after she took over as party leader in October 2025. She patched together a replacement pact with the Nippon Ishin party, agreed only on the eve of the parliamentary vote that made her prime minister.
That new coalition arrived with strings attached: Ishin wanted a cut to the number of lower house seats, a suspension of the consumption tax on food and a ban on corporate political donations, and media reports suggested her LDP backers were unlikely to accept all of it. Even with Ishin on side, the coalition sat two seats short of a majority, leaving Takaichi dependent on unaffiliated MPs to pass a budget. Masato Kamikubo, a professor at Ritsumeikan University, said at the time that she had no room to govern on her own terms and could only seek cooperation issue by issue. Chiyako Sato, a commentator for the Mainichi Shimbun, put it more bluntly: the era of single-party LDP dominance was over, replaced by multiparty bargaining for every vote.
Smaller parties are pulling voters away from the LDP
The instability has an outside cause as well as an inside one. Conservative voters unhappy with Ishiba’s leadership had already begun drifting toward Sanseito, a far-right party. Jeffrey Hall, a lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies, said many Abe supporters felt Ishiba lacked Abe’s strong views against China. Sanseito’s presence in the upper house grew sharply in the summer 2025 election on the back of that shift.
The same pull showed up again in the snap election of early 2026. Sanseito’s seat count rose from two to 15 in that election, and a new party called Mirai won 11 seats on its first attempt.
Why Takaichi gambled on an election three months in
Facing all of that, Takaichi called a snap election of her own on 23 January 2026, barely three months into the job, betting that her approval rating of around 70 per cent would carry the LDP back to strength. It worked further than anyone had forecast. The LDP took 316 seats, clearing the 310 needed for a supermajority and rising from 198 beforehand, while its coalition with Ishin ended up holding 352 of the chamber’s 465 seats.
The main loser was the opposition itself. The Constitutional Democratic Party and Komeito had merged into a new Centrist Reform Alliance days before the vote, but the alliance fell from the 167 seats its two parts had held to just 49.
A landslide of that size buys a prime minister time that none of the last four got. Even so, one analysis of the result warns that there is no room for complacency. Sanseito and Mirai both made inroads in the same election that handed Takaichi her supermajority.
