LDP Abandons Plan to Pass FY2026 Budget; Diet Passes Provisional Budget

The Yomiuri Shimbun

16:57 JST, March 30, 2026

The Liberal Democratic Party informed the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan on Monday that it had abandoned its plan to pass its fiscal 2026 budget bill within the current fiscal year.

Instead, a provisional budget bill for fiscal 2026 — intended to serve as a stopgap until a new fiscal year’s budget can be passed — was passed by plenary sessions of the lower and upper house on the day.

LDP upper house Diet Affairs Committee Chairman Yoshihiko Isozaki told his CDPJ counterpart Yoshitaka Saito on Monday morning, “We will have to abandon the goal of passing the budget within the current fiscal year.” Saito accepted his proposal. Isozaki also suggested to Saito that the upper house Budget Committee should entrust relevant committees with examining the fiscal 2026 budget proposals for each ministry and agency on Wednesday and Thursday.

Backed by the majority they secured in the latest House of Representatives election, the government and the ruling parties compressed deliberations of the fiscal 2026 budget bill in the lower house to an unusually short period of two weeks, down from the customary one month or so, in an effort to have the budget passed by the end of March.

Deliberations began in the upper house on March 16. But since the ruling coalition does not hold a majority in that chamber, it had no choice but to accede to the opposition’s demand for sufficient deliberation time.

The provisional budget bill was debated on Monday morning in the lower house Budget Committee, where Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said, “We have decided to compile a provisional budget to ensure there is no gap in funding.”

The provisional budget was passed by the lower house plenary session and sent to the upper house, where it was deliberated in the Budget Committee and then passed, again by a plenary session. The Centrist Reform Alliance and the Democratic Party for the People, both of which had demanded a provisional budget be drafted, voted in favor.

The provisional budget covers the period from Wednesday to April 11, when the 2026 budget will be automatically enacted. General account expenditures for the year will total ¥8.56 trillion, including tax allocations to local governments and social security-related expenses such as pensions and welfare benefits.

The last time a provisional budget bill was submitted to the Diet was in fiscal 2015, under the administration of then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.