Upper House Election: 16 Constituencies See Head-to-head ‘Ruling vs Opposition’ Races; Opposition Parties More Coordinated than 3 Years Ago

The Yomiuri Shimbun

20:00 JST, July 4, 2025

Of the 125 seats at stake in this House of Councillors election, 32 are being contested in constituencies with only one seat up for grabs. These constituencies will likely be the scenes of particularly fierce fighting between the ruling and opposition parties, as they cannot split the available seats there.

Yoshihiko Noda, president of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, chose Miyazaki as the venue of his first speech on Thursday, when the election campaign kicked off. Miyazaki Prefecture is a single-seat constituency.

“The election results will depend on how many seats we can win in constituencies where one seat is being contested. I’d like to strengthen our offensive from the west to all over the rest of the country,” Noda said in his speech.

Miyazaki Prefecture is part of Kyushu, a conservative region where the Liberal Democratic Party has traditionally been strong, but as the CDPJ believes that the opposition parties now have a better chance of winning in such a single-seat district in the Kyushu region, it plans to focus on sending Noda and other executives there.

The CDPJ was wary of opposition candidates competing against each other in such constituencies. The largest opposition party called for a common goal of “reducing the number of seats held by the ruling parties,” and negotiated to coordinate candidates with the Japan Innovation Party, the Japanese Communist Party and the Democratic Party for the People.

However, the party managed to field joint opposition candidates, effectively bringing about a ruling camp versus opposition camp structure, in only 16 constituencies.

In the 2016 and 2019 upper house elections, the opposition parties fielded joint candidates in all constituencies where one seat was up for grabs, achieving some success with 11 wins in 2016 and 10 wins in 2019.

The opposition parties’ weak cooperation in this election is thought to be due to factors such as a struggle for leadership among the opposition parties against the minority government. Even so, the number of single-seat districts in which the ruling and opposition parties are facing off head-to-head increased from 11 in the previous upper house election in 2022. In that election, the opposition parties ended up winning four of them.

The LDP also sent big-name speakers, including Policy Research Council Chairperson Itsunori Onodera and former Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, to Miyagi and Kumamoto prefectures, both of which are constituencies where one seat is being contested, on Thursday in an attempt to bolster the party’s position.

The LDP seriously fears that the party may lose its conservative voters. Sanseito, which has its sights set on conservative voters, is fielding candidates in all constituencies, which has worried Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who is also the president of the LDP. Ishiba has reportedly been telling people around him that the LDP could lose votes to Sanseito.

Adding to the blow, Komeito decided not to endorse four LDP candidates in single-seat districts following the scandal surrounding political fundraising parties for LDP factions.

“We don’t have the wind at our back. We have no choice but to win by using our organizational strength, especially in constituencies where opposition parties are competing,” a senior LDP member said.