A week is a long time in politics, as the old adage goes, but the 12 days of the recent campaign for the Lower House of the Japanese Diet feel like an eternity when one considers how much has changed politically in that brief interlude.

Sanae Takaichi’s dramatic landslide win in Japan’s General Election on 8 February marks a seismic change in postwar Japanese politics, overturning conventional political wisdom.

Just a few months ago, Shigeru Ishiba, Takaichi’s predecessor as Prime Minister, was struggling to lead a governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that appeared to be in terminal decline. Battered by a damaging set of corruption scandals that dated from the time of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, confronting a persistent cost of living crisis that was eroding public support for the Ishiba administration, and struggling to offset the punitive tariff policies of the Trump administration, the LDP – Japan’s once dominant political machine – appeared to be losing its grip on power.

The LDP’s decline was confirmed following a lacklustre performance in the October Lower House elections of 2024, and a similarly anaemic result in the Upper House elections of July 2025, which reduced the party to minority status in both houses of the Japanese parliament and left it floundering in the face of a new populist wave of anti-elitist populist politics.

Since taking over from Ishiba last autumn as party leader and prime minister, Takaichi has radically transformed the party’s fortunes. After jettisoning the LDP’s former coalition partner of 25 years – Komeito, a centrist, Buddhist-affiliated party – in favour of the more right-of-centre and nationalistically inclined Japan Innovation Party, or Ishin no Kai, Takaichi has managed the unthinkable by restoring her party to a position of unassailable primacy – at least for the foreseeable future.

The vote tally from the election demonstrates this unambiguously, with the LDP adding an astonishing 125 seats to its pre-election total of 198, giving it a final figure of 316 seats in the 465 lower house. With the addition of 36 seats from Ishin, the new governing coalition now commands 352 seats. This unambiguous supermajority provides Takaichi’s administration with enormous legislative and political clout and the power to chair and staff all of the key parliamentary committees in the House of Representatives. This is not only a dramatic rebounding of support for the LDP, it also represents the party’s biggest electoral victory since 1955, both in strict numerical terms – the 316 seat tally for the party is the LDP’s highest result in the postwar period – but also as a share of the overall number of seats in the lower house. By contrast, the main opposition party, the Centrist Reform Alliance (CRA) – a coalition between Komeito and the Constitutional Democratic Party, hastily formed in January of 2026 in anticipation of the general election – has suffered a devastating electoral defeat, losing 123 seats, reducing its strength in the lower house from 167 to 49. Reeling from this loss, including the defeat of once prominent party stalwarts such as Katsuya Okada and Yukio Edano, the CRA’s leaders, Yoshihiko Noda (a former Prime Minister) and Tetsuo Saito, have both resigned and the party is now in the process of electing new leaders.

Takaichi’s success is particularly striking when viewed historically – bigger than comparably strong performances by previous LDP leaders such as Yasuhiro Nakasone in 1986, or Junichiro Koizumi in the early 2000s. It marks Takaichi out as a historically norm-breaking and unprecedentedly strong new leader for the party.

Her success – and by extension the victory of her party colleagues who have ridden back into power so decisively on her coattails – is the product of her remarkable popularity with the electorate, particularly young voters in their 20s and 30s, both men and women, who have seemingly warmed to her decisiveness, her clarity of speech and her focus in terms of mapping out a clear policy agenda. This agenda spans tax cuts, strong defence policy, assertiveness in foreign policy (particularly in managing a challenging relationship with the US and dealing with a combative and threatening China) and a pragmatic, strategically targeted fiscal approach.

Part of her appeal is also her distinctiveness and in part her gender, as the first female leader of the LDP; part is also a function of style, and her colourfulness – figuratively and literally (she dresses in bright blue) – in contrast to the grey-suited men who have dominated the senior ranks of mainstream politics in Japan. Takaichi’s novelty and appeal has also been fuelled by her shrewd use of social media – she has a sizeable Twitter following and posts regularly – and an emerging fan-base of young supporters who are more interested in her appearance and the minutiae of her fashion choices than they are in her policy positions. Youthful images of her as a motorcycle-riding, heavy metal enthusiast and drummer have added to her popular appeal and the curiosity that she has attracted since becoming LDP leader last summer.

Importantly, Takaichi’s standing in the party and across the electorate is also a function of her conservatism. Her political mentor is former Prime Minister Abe and she has embraced a more self-consciously nationalist form of identity politics, stressing national greatness, an attachment to traditional national symbols such as the Emperor, and a dislike of overly self-critical historical interpretations of Japan’s pre-1945 past. This marks her out from some of her more liberal-minded predecessors. Paradoxically then, Takaichi looks forwards and backwards, combining both political nostalgia and an image of innovation and change, to represent herself as a distinctive and different type of leader.

Looking ahead, Takaichi’s policy challenges are likely to be dominated in the first instance by economic uncertainty, the issue that was most important to voters in the recent election. Her populist proposal to temporarily suspend the consumption tax on food from 8 per cent to zero for a limited two-year period is likely to prove hugely expensive – somewhere in the region of $32 billion. With finance ministry officials and the markets reportedly sceptical that the government has a clear plan for how to finance this initiative, and given the country’s high level of indebtedness, Takaichi has shrewdly decided to prevaricate, setting up a cross party investigative council to deliberate on the initiative and to report sometime in the summer. She may be hoping that this additional breathing space will allow her to properly contemplate the financial risks from this initiative. At the same time, she can reassure the markets without immediately inviting criticism from her political opponents that she has backtracked on her earlier election pledge. In the meantime, she will almost certainly double down on her ambitious plans to promote her fiscally expansive and targeted investment strategy across 17 sectors, including critical minerals, biotechnology, precision machinery and quantum computing.

In foreign policy, Takaichi can look forward to a meeting at the White House with Donald Trump on 19 March where she can build on her successful summit in Tokyo last October to strengthen US-Japan alliance ties. Trump and Takaichi appear to get on well. The US President was forthright in endorsing Takaichi before the election and will be pleased by her victory. However, recent reports suggest that Trump is starting to become irritated by what he views as foot-dragging by Japanese officials in implementing last year’s commitment (negotiated under the US threat of extortionate tariff measures) to invest $550 billion in the American market. Here, Tokyo may be engaging in another form of prevarication, hoping that the US Supreme Court’s anticipated ruling on the constitutionality of Trump’s trade policy may offer an escape route from this extraordinarily expensive if not fiscally ruinous financial commitment.

On security and foreign policy more generally, Takaichi has already signalled her intent to push ahead with an ambitious series of new initiatives agreed by the LDP and Ishin when they formed their coalition last year. This includes new anti-espionage legislation, the creation of a new intelligence agency (modelled on MI6 or the CIA), possible relaxation of the rules governing arms exports (a step intended to substantially boost Japan’s defence-industrial base), and even the suggestion – hinted at obliquely – that the country might acquire nuclear-powered submarines and be willing to relax the rules prohibiting the transit of nuclear weapons through Japanese territory.

The latter change would be a remarkable departure for a country that, at least at the level of mainstream public opinion, has been firmly committed to an anti-nuclear policy since 1945. Floating such an idea is indicative of just how much political perceptions have changed in Japan and the new space that has opened up for a more forthright discussion of national security issues. Anxiety about the long-term reliability of the United States as an alliance partner, awareness of the proximity of the security threat from a de facto nuclear North Korea, and the increased incursions into Japanese territorial waters and airspace by Chinese and Russian military units, have all impressed on the Japanese public and senior officials, both politicians and civil servants, the urgency of building up the country’s defences. This is something that Takaichi is firmly committed to doing.

The willingness to depart from postwar norms is also reflected in Takaichi’s assertive position on the question of constitutional revision. This particular matter has long been the holy grail of political ambition for Japan’s conservatives who maintain that the US-inspired 1947 Constitution was tainted by its foreign provenance and is a reminder of a lack of political agency on the part of the Japanese government. In the past, progressive and liberal voices in Japan have pushed back firmly against this stance, arguing that revision would run the risk of undermining the country’s democratic and pacifist norms. Now with a clear two-thirds majority in the lower house, the LDP government has the numbers to initiate a discussion of how best to move revision forward substantively. Potentially, if it can secure support from like-minded pro-revision partners in the upper house (where the government does not have a majority), the LDP will succeed in moving the constitutional revision issue forward to the point where changes to the constitution are presented to the electorate in a national referendum.

Key substantive changes in any revised document would most likely involve a clear acknowledgement of the constitutionality of the country’s Self-Defence Forces as well as measures to strengthen the country’s crisis management capabilities. It is too early to assess the likelihood of such an initiative succeeding, but there is no mistaking that Takaichi is firmly committed to moving forwards on this question. If she were to succeed, this would be an extraordinary and era-defining change in a political environment which, for most of the postwar period, has been balanced relatively evenly between the forces of the left and the right.

Takaichi’s rise to prominence and her newfound authority at home is symptomatic of wider political trends – a rightwards tilt in global politics and a new, unapologetic nationalism.

This shift is not necessarily incompatible with internationalism, alliance management and the development of innovative new partnerships and policies with like-minded countries – an area where Japan has a long track record of successful leadership. Whether Japan’s new Prime Minister has the capacity to advance both her international and domestic agendas in this challenging and increasingly threatening global environment remains to be seen. But, for now, Japan’s voters have granted her a decisive mandate to realise these ambitions.