Special Diet Session to Consider Budget, Proposed National Intelligence Bureau and Foreign Investments in Japan

The Yomiuri Shimbun

18:19 JST, February 19, 2026

The current Diet session, which convened on Wednesday, is set to last 150 days until July 17, an unusually long period for a special Diet session. This is because the House of Representatives was dissolved at the very beginning of the last ordinary Diet session, and no deliberations on the budget and bills were held.

One of the main topics will be a bill to reduce the number of lower house seats, which is expected to be reintroduced. The Japan Innovation Party implied a possibility that the reduction may be targeted only at the proportional representation segment.

Fumitake Fujita, coleader of the JIP, was asked on an NHK program on Wednesday about the idea of reviewing the content of the bill, which would eliminate 25 seats in single-seat constituencies and 20 seats in the proportional representation segment. “That is quite possible. We would like to deliberate again and think about what form the bill should be submitted in,” he said.

He also said that the initial idea of the JIP was to reduce only the number of seats in the proportional representation segment. The idea had been withdrawn in response to opposition from Komeito and other parties earlier.

Other bills expected to be debated in the current Diet session include a bill to establish a national intelligence bureau to strengthen intelligence activities and a bill related to the establishment of a committee to strictly review investments in Japanese companies by foreign capital.

The special Diet session is usually held immediately after the House of Representatives election, and lasts only a few days to conduct the elections of the speaker and vice-speaker of the lower house and the prime ministerial election.

In the past, there have been cases in which the special Diet session lasted for a long period, but in many cases, as in this case, it was because substantive deliberations could not be conducted in the ordinary Diet session due to the House of Representatives election.