Less than six months after her assumption of office as Japan’s 104th (and first female) prime minister, and two months since her rise was confirmed by a resounding victory in a national election, the grip of Takaichi Sanae on the levers of state is unchallenged, and her support level remains high.
However, thoughtful and historically aware commentators are speculating that a fundamental transition of the state might be underway, one from “peace state” to “war state.” Looking back to the Konoe Fumimaro government of 1937, which in retrospect we can see as taking the steps that led to a catastrophic war four years later, they fear that Takaichi might be replaying that scenario.
On February 8, 2026, the Japanese people went to the polls for an election to the lower house of the National Diet. It was generally taken to be a test of the latest government led by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), formed in October 2025. With the party leader Takaichi enjoying support levels of around 70 percent, the election outcome was scarcely in doubt, but its scale still took many by surprise. Takaichi took the LDP from 198 seats (short of the 233 needed for a parliamentary majority) to 316 seats, giving the LDP a two-thirds supermajority.
The election outcome was scarcely in doubt, but its scale still took many by surprise.
She confronted an opposition led by the mildly reformist Centrist Reform Alliance (CRA), a new force formed through a merger of the former Constitutional Democratic Party and the neo-Buddhist Komeito, a long-standing coalition partner of the LDP. Having set out to increase its Diet strength, the CRA suffered instead a humiliating loss, dropping from 167 to forty-nine seats.
In the long history of the LDP from its foundation in 1955, no leader had ever performed quite so brilliantly as Takaichi. She emerged from the election with political power greater even than her sometime mentor, Abe Shinzo. Her supermajority in the Diet meant that, unlike…
Auteur: Gavan McCormack
