Japan’s Budget Proposal to Be Passed in Lower House as Ruling Parties Aim for Approval by End of Month

The Yomiuri Shimbun

15:27 JST, March 13, 2026

The fiscal 2026 budget proposal is to be passed in the House of Representatives Budget Committee with the support of the majority ruling coalition on Friday evening.

The proposal is then expected to be approved at the plenary session of the lower house later on Friday.

The government and ruling parties aim to have the budget approved at the Diet within the current fiscal year, which ends this month. To achieve this, the committee deliberations will be unusually short at just two weeks, compared to the about one month they normally take.

The ruling parties decided not to hold a question-and-answer session that had been scheduled in the lower house committee on Friday morning because four opposition parties submitted a motion to dismiss committee chair Tetsushi Sakamoto of the Liberal Democratic Party the previous evening. The motion to dismiss Sakamoto was defeated by a majority vote on Friday.

The ruling parties plan to vote on the budget proposal at the Budget Committee and then the plenary session later on Friday.

Team Mirai, which the LDP had sought cooperation from, plans to oppose the budget proposal.

LDP House of Councillors Diet Affairs Committee Chairperson Yoshihiko Isozaki met with his counterpart at the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan Yoshitaka Saito at the Diet Building on Friday morning. Isozaki proposed starting deliberations on the budget proposal at the upper house on Monday, but no agreement was reached.