Japanese Politics in 2025: Seven Challenges Threaten to Unseat Ishiba

A Ticking Political Clock

The first major challenge for Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru in 2025 will come in late January, when the fiscal 2025 budget is debated in the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives. The Liberal Democratic Party no longer claims a majority in the lower house, so the committee is being chaired by Azumi Jun, a former finance minister and Diet affairs chief of the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan. Committee deliberations will thus be a tough test for gaffe-prone members of the Ishiba cabinet and those implicated in a political funds scandal. Azumi could very well force reluctant LDP members to testify as sworn witnesses in the Diet.

Of the Budget Committee’s 50 members, 24 are from the ruling coalition and 26 are opposition lawmakers. The budget may pass the committee if the 3 members from the Democratic Party for the People align with the ruling bloc, but if an incident occurs during deliberations that prompts the DPFP to side with the opposition, the bill will be rejected, and the Ishiba cabinet will need to resign en masse.

Of the 17 lower-house standing committees, 7 are chaired by the opposition, including the Budget Committee. In these bodies, the ruling parties will be unable to pass legislation without opposition help, forcing them to accommodate demands for revisions and potentially shaking up the policymaking and legislative process that had long been under LDP control.

Even if Ishiba clears the first hurdle and gets the budget passed, he could still be forced to step down if his approval rating plummets, as this would trigger worries—mainly among LDP House of Councillors members who will be up for reelection in the summer 2025 upper house election—about the prime minister’s leadership abilities. Similar fears prompted the LDP to make a leadership change—replacing unpopular Mori Yoshirō with Koizumi Jun’ichirō—prior to the 2001 upper house vote. Ishiba’s second challenge will thus be winning over public opinion by early spring.

If he succeeds in maintaining respectable approval ratings and muffling internal discontent, there is a chance he will survive until the end of the Diet’s regular session around June.

But then he will confront a third challenge: the likelihood of a no-confidence motion submitted by the opposition. Ishiba can clear this hurdle if, like the budget, the DPFP can be persuaded to side with the government parties. But with key elections coming up—the term of half of upper house members will end on July 28 and that of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly will conclude on July 22—the DPFP could very well choose to assert its presence and reject Ishiba. This will force either the cabinet to resign en masse or the prime minister to dissolve the lower house.

If Ishiba chooses the former option, the LDP will have to step down and hand the reins of power to the opposition. If he opts for the latter, a lower house snap election will be called, most likely on the same day as that for the upper house. He could also, in an act of desperation, call for simultaneous elections as soon as a no-confidence motion is submitted, without waiting for a floor vote.

Even if he survives the motion, Ishiba would then confront his fourth and biggest challenge: the need to win the Tokyo and upper house contests, particularly the latter, which will determine the fate of his administration. LDP members are fully aware that voters remain unhappy over the lack of transparency in the flow of political funds, even after the party received a good scolding in the October 2024 lower house election.

The LDP and its coalition partner Kōmeitō currently hold 140 seats in the upper chamber, well above the 125 needed for a majority. The parties will likely remain in power if they can retain a majority in the upcoming election—assuming that the lower house is not dissolved—but there will be continued political instability unless they can persuade the DPFP to either join the coalition or at least cooperate with them on an extra-cabinet basis.

Should the LDP-Kōmeitō bloc wind up losing more than 15 seats, though, the balance of power in the upper house would shift to the opposition, and Ishiba would almost certainly be forced to step down as president of the LDP. The party will gain a new lease on life if Ishiba’s successor manages to lure the DPFP into a three-party coalition, but if not, the LDP would need to relinquish the reins of government, which could spur sweeping political change.

Isolated Within His Own Party

A scenario in which Ishiba successfully overcomes all these four impediments and remains in office beyond the summer is rather unlikely. This is because he faces two internal challenges in addition to those outlined above.

The first is the dearth of colleagues supporting him as the nation’s leader. A prime minister needs a strong team to forcefully advance his policy agenda. Abe Shinzō’s second administration, for example, lasted for seven years and eight months thanks to a well-organized staff led by Suga Yoshihide as chief cabinet secretary. Kishida Fumio, meanwhile, relied on Kihara Seiji, who, as deputy chief cabinet secretary, worked tirelessly behind the scenes on the prime minister’s behalf.

The nearest equivalent in the Ishiba administration is Akazawa Ryōsei, a fellow Tottori Prefecture legislator and an aide to the prime minister with his own office in the Prime Minister’s Office. But he is also a member of the Ishiba cabinet; in addition to being the minister in charge of economic revitalization, he is saddled with an array of portfolios, such as economic and fiscal policy, preparations for the establishment of a Disaster Management Agency, and wage increases. He is already overstretched and will thus be unable to fulfill the kind of fixer role that Kihara played under Kishida. The former Ishiba faction has already disbanded, and the prime minister has few close, trusted colleagues to whom he can turn.

The second challenge is Ishiba’s isolation within his own party. No sizable group in the LDP enthusiastically supports him, as suggested by the process by which he was elected LDP president in a runoff with Takaichi Sanae, a hardline conservative. Given the prospect of having to fight an election against Noda Yoshihiko, who had just been selected president of the CDPJ, and the range of complex foreign policy issues in the offing, the powerbrokers in the LDP—notably those affiliated with Kishida and Suga—grudgingly backed Ishiba as the lesser of two evils.

Party management is currently in the hands of Secretary General Moriyama Hiroshi. He had been a leader of his own faction, but it was a small group of less than 10 members, and some are beginning to question his administrative skills. Members of the former Abe faction who supported Takaichi in her presidential bid are obviously wary of Ishiba, but so are other such party heavyweights as former Prime Minister Asō Tarō and former Secretary General Motegi Toshimitsu.

Replacing Ishiba at this juncture, though, will do nothing to alter the minority-government status of the administration. Challenges will continue no matter who is in charge unless there is a realignment of political forces. It is thanks to this fragile balance of power that Ishiba has managed to survive thus far.

Ishiba’s intraparty rivals may be content to see the administration push through the fiscal 2025 budget, after which they will either try rocking the boat or—if defeat in the upper house election appears inevitable—leave him to face the music alone and then force him out by blaming him for the loss. Rather than helping Ishiba, LDP power-seekers would be glad to use him while they can, while advancing plans to claim their own moment in the sun.

Groping for Answers in 2025

Looking beyond internal hardships, Ishiba faces formidable challenges in the global arena as well. He sought a meeting with incoming US President Donald Trump on the return leg of his November trip to South America but was unable to secure an appointment. And his failure to abide by diplomatic protocol during his first overseas tour left question marks about his ability to work with world leaders. As its economic slowdown deepens, China is adopting a softer stance toward Japan, but given the volatile situation in South Korea and the warming ties between Russia and North Korea, Japan faces an increasingly difficult security environment.

Ishiba’s lack of diplomatic skills is conspicuous, especially in comparison with the trust Abe was able to build with Trump and that Kishida also forged with US President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.

The loss of a lower house majority by the LDP signals a major turning point in Japan’s political landscape. Since its founding in 1955, the LDP has only twice been forced out of power—in 1993, when it was replaced by the Hosokawa Morihiro coalition government, and in 2009, when it was swept away by the Democratic Party of Japan. In both cases, the LDP managed to rebuild and to return to power within a few years. The LDP’s dominance is now being seriously challenged, and there is uncertainty about how the party will adapt.

The year 2025 will mark several significant milestones: it will be the hundredth year since the start of the Shōwa era, 80 years since the end of World War II, and 70 years since the birth of the LDP. The changes brought about by the results of the October 2024 general election will have far-reaching repercussions, not just for the fate of the Ishiba administration but for the future of Japanese politics. There will likely be continued instability and a groping for answers in 2025 as parties seek to shape a new political order and style of government.

(Originally published in Japanese. Banner photo: Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru, at front,  visits Ise Shrine on January 6, 2025. © Kyōdō.)