Parties Gear Up for Feb. 8 Lower House Election; LDP Hurries to Compile Campaign Pledges

The Yomiuri Shimbun

17:20 JST, January 20, 2026

Both ruling and opposition parties switched into gear on Tuesday for the upcoming House of Representatives election. Just the day before, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi announced her intention to dissolve the lower house later this week.

Takaichi said Monday that she will dissolve the lower house on Friday, at the beginning of the ordinary Diet session scheduled to be convened that day, and official campaigning will kick off on Jan. 27, with voting to take place on Feb. 8.

With the period between the dissolution and the voting day set to be only 16 days — the shortest for a lower house race since the end of World War II — each party is scrambling to prepare.

The Liberal Democratic Party held a party board meeting at its headquarters in Tokyo on Tuesday.

“This will be a battle over a short [campaign] period, but I want us to fight together as a unified party and secure victory at any cost,” said Takaichi, who is also the LDP president.

“I will spare no effort to earn public trust for a new coalition government framework, a drastic review of the budget formulation policies and our use of responsible and proactive public finances to achieve a major shift in fiscal policy,” she added.

LDP Secretary General Shunichi Suzuki said at a press conference after the meeting that the LDP party convention, originally scheduled to be held in Tokyo on March 15, would be postponed to April 12 due to the lower house election.

The LDP is working at a fever pitch to put together its campaign pledges.

Takayuki Kobayashi, the party’s Policy Research Council chairperson, met with Takaichi at the Prime Minister’s Office on Monday evening and outlined a draft of the pledges. They will likely be finalized on Wednesday.

Fumitake Fujita, co-representative of the LDP’s current coalition partner, the Japan Innovation Party, appeared on an internet program on Tuesday morning in which he said, “As the structure of the coalition has changed, so has the political structure.”

“We will ask the public to evaluate the contents of the coalition agreement,” he added, aligning himself with Takaichi.

The opposition parties are also steadily moving forward with their own election preparations.

The Centrist Reform Alliance — the new party formed by the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan and Komeito — unveiled a poster for the lower house election on Tuesday afternoon.

The CDPJ rushed to recruit candidates in single-seat constituencies from Friday to Sunday. It received applications from 173 people, including 25 women. The party is expediting its screening process with the goal of finding people to run in constituencies where it currently lacks a candidate.

Democratic Party for the People leader Yuichiro Tamaki said at a press conference on Tuesday morning: “Now that it’s decided [that an election will be held], we have no choice but to fight to the end. We will field candidates nationwide and fight with all our might to secure 51 seats and 9 million votes [in the proportional representation segment].”

He gave a speech on a street in Tokyo later in the day.