Upper House Election: Komeito Suffers Historic Defeat, Winning Record-low 8 Seats; Rival to Saito Yet to Emerge in Junior Coalition Partner

The Yomiuri Shimbun

14:07 JST, July 22, 2025

Komeito suffered a historic defeat, winning only eight seats in the recent House of Councillors election, the lowest ever number for the party formed in 1964.

With the aging of the members of the party’s support body Soka Gakkai, Komeito has not been able to halt the decline in its campaigning and vote-gathering power.

“Members of the party for whom I have very high expectations and who will carry the future of the party have lost their elections,” Komeito leader Tetsuo Saito said at a press conference on Monday. “It is deeply regrettable and painful.”

Shock is spreading within the party because the defeat follows similar results in last year’s House of Representatives election and June’s Tokyo metropolitan assembly election, which the party attached the same importance to as a national election.

In the constituency segment of the election, in which Komeito ran seven candidates, the party lost the seats it held in Saitama, Kanagawa, and Aichi, the first time in 18 years that it has failed to win a seat in these constituencies. In each of these three, Sanseito won. Although Komeito had taken measures in the final stages of the campaign to launch its own policies concerning foreigners with Sanseito in mind, a senior Komeito official said, “It was too late.”

The party had targeted 7 million votes in the proportional representation segment, but only received about 5.21 million. A Soka Gakkai source said that “the last push is no longer possible,” citing the impact of the death of its honorary president Daisaku Ikeda in 2023. A senior official of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has been cooperating with Komeito in the election for many years, also pointed out on Sunday that “the organization of the Soka Gakkai has weakened by a surprising amount.”

“I am thinking about what the appropriate way to take responsibility is,” said Saito, who was appointed to the post of leader in November in an emergency bid to rebuild the party after a heavy defeat in last year’s lower house election. While there are voices within the party that hold Saito responsible, the idea of his resignation has not become widespread yet. This is because the party has not produced a leader who is able to win the consensus of the entire party. “We are not in a situation where the party’s momentum can be reversed by changing its face,” said a Komeito source.