Japan’s first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, has broken a barrier that stood for centuries — but her victory signals continuity more than change. A conservative shaped by Shinzo Abe’s legacy, she inherits a fractured political landscape and a public exhausted by corruption and stagnation. Her rise is historic, yet her agenda suggests Japan is entering a more polarized, rather than more progressive, era.
Key takeaways:
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Sanae Takaichi’s historic ascent as Japan’s first female prime minister is progress in symbolism more than substance; her policies and cabinet picks largely reinforce, rather than challenge, traditional gender norms.
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Her nationalist, conservative agenda, and hawkish foreign policy have sharpened divisions, alienating moderates and stoking political unrest.
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With the LDP–Komeito alliance collapsed and only a fragile arrangement with the JIP, Takaichi heads a shaky minority government whose internal rifts threaten stability and governance.
This article is the first in a two-part series examining the election of Sanae Takaichi as Japan’s prime minister and its implications for Japan’s political trajectory. The upcoming second part will assess her emerging foreign and security policy outlook.
On October 4, Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) faced a tight leadership race between Sanae Takaichi and Shinjiro Koizumi, following the resignation of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba. Under Ishiba, the party suffered a string of election defeats amid a stagnant economy, rising food prices, and public outrage over financing scandals. He became the third consecutive prime minister to fail to revive the LDP’s tarnished image and now steps down as leader of a minority government. In his resignation speech, Ishiba warned that the party’s loss of public trust is fueling the rise of populism.
The LDP leadership race
The two leading candidates vying to succeed Ishiba as party leader were Shinjiro Koizumi, a former agriculture minister, and Sanae Takaichi, a veteran minister who had served under prime ministers Shinzo Abe and Fumio Kishida. Both lost to Ishiba in the previous leadership contest. The 2025 leadership race exemplified Japan’s so-called “1.5-party system,” in which, because the ruling LDP has dominated national politics for decades, its leader is almost automatically the prime minister. The contest went to a second round, where Takaichi prevailed by 185 votes to 156.
Takaichi is arguably the more polarizing of the two. A protégé of former prime minister Abe, she supports continuing his hawkish foreign policy, push to revise the constitution, and economic agenda. She has pledged to revive “Abenomics,” her mentor’s early-2010s program aimed at jolting Japan’s long-stagnant economy. In foreign affairs, tensions with neighboring countries may rise due to her views on sensitive historical issues. She has criticized Japanese school curricula for downplaying Japan’s achievements while, in her view, overemphasizing the darker chapters of its early 20th-century militarism—even questioning whether that era should be labeled as one of “aggression” at all. Domestically, she has signaled plans for tighter policies toward foreigners who misuse social benefits, overstay visas, or commit crimes, moves reflecting growing unease over Japan’s record-high levels of immigration.
Her defeated rival, Koizumi, is the son of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, one of Japan’s most popular postwar leaders. Had he won, the 44-year-old politician would have become the youngest prime minister in Japan’s modern history. As agriculture minister under Ishiba, he gained public support for suspending competitive rice sales to stabilize and ultimately reduce rice prices. A long-time advocate for ending Japan’s reliance on nuclear energy, Koizumi has sought to carry on his father’s reformist legacy. In foreign policy, he is viewed as a moderate within the LDP, though he has also courted controversy with repeated visits to the Yasukuni Shrine. While supporting constitutional revisions to “normalize” Japan’s defense policy, he argues that other domestic challenges take precedence. Now appointed by Takaichi as defense minister, Koizumi is expected to draw on his extensive US contacts to navigate tense bilateral relations and oversee Japan’s ongoing military modernization.
Takaichi’s victory might signal cultural change in a traditionally male-dominated society, but in fact, the opposite may be true. Nicknamed the “Japanese Margaret Thatcher,” Takaichi is in many ways a deeply conservative figure and has explicitly cited the late British prime minister as her role model. Japan’s first female prime minister opposes allowing women to keep their maiden names after marriage and rejects reforms that would allow women to ascend to the imperial throne. Moreover, shortly after taking office, Takaichi signaled her intention to ease regulations on working hours, potentially reversing the 2019 reforms that set limits to curb Japan’s culture of overwork. This move may also clash with her earlier pledge to create “a society where people don’t have to give up their careers” because of child-rearing. Looser labor rules are unlikely to benefit women striving to balance professional and family life. In Japan, career advancement has long been tied to a willingness to sacrifice personal and family time as a display of loyalty to one’s company. That structural expectation has been a major obstacle for women seeking to pursue both a career and motherhood. Takaichi has also opposed legalizing same-sex marriage despite a recent Supreme Court ruling suggesting that the current ban may be unconstitutional, and has reiterated her view that marriage should remain between “both sexes.”
Break-up with the Komeito
Takaichi’s election has sparked mixed reactions both domestically and internationally. It is unlikely to resolve the LDP’s long-standing crisis. Her nationalist and conservative positions may help rally far-right voters, but at the cost of alienating moderates. The LDP’s minority coalition partner, the Komeito party, has already announced it will not support Takaichi in the lower-house confidence vote, leaving her dependent on backing from the opposition. Komeito judged Takaichi’s positions too extreme for its moderately conservative base, while also signaling that it had little confidence in her ability to address the LDP’s recurring funding scandals.
Founded as the political arm of the Nichiren Buddhist organization Sōka Gakkai, Komeito promotes social welfare, humanistic socialism, and pacifism, drawing inspiration from both Buddhist teachings and Euro-American philosophical traditions. Historically, the party has acted as a moderating force on the LDP’s more hawkish tendencies. It is, therefore, not surprising that Komeito leader Tetsuo Saito has openly criticized Takaichi’s hardline foreign policy stance and her inflammatory rhetoric toward foreigners. A meeting between Komeito and Takaichi on October 10 failed to produce results, leading to a formal break from the historic coalition. The party now appears to be moving closer to the opposition, particularly the Democratic Party for the People (DPFP), to advance its policy goals.
This has effectively ended the 26-year political partnership between the LDP and Komeito. Some observers have described this as an “existential crisis for the LDP.”. The so-called “1955 System,” characterized by LDP dominance, now faces unprecedented strain, both from internal divisions within the party and from a growing loss of public trust.
A new ally
Despite the breakup with Komeito, the LDP has found a substitute coalition partner in the center-right Japan Innovation Party (JIP), also known as Ishin no Kai. Originally a local Osaka-based party, it advocates decentralization and seeks to elevate Osaka in opposition to Tokyo’s long-standing political dominance. The party currently controls both the executive and legislative branches of the city and prefecture, and its leader, Hirofumi Yoshimura, serves as Osaka’s governor.
Having lost Komeito’s small but significant support base, the LDP welcomed the JIP’s 54 parliamentary seats, nine more than Komeito’s 45. Together, the two parties hold 231 seats, just two short of a parliamentary majority, giving the LDP slightly more room for negotiation with other parties. Nonetheless, Takaichi will still preside over a minority government that will have to negotiate with opposition parties to pass legislation, since they can now more easily exercise veto power.
Forming this new alliance was not an easy process for Takaichi. During coalition talks, JIP leader Yoshimura presented a 12-point proposal to the LDP, including reducing the number of parliamentary seats by 10%, cutting consumption tax on food to zero, banning corporate and organizational political donations, and advancing the “second capital” initiative to elevate Osaka’s status. The LDP ultimately accepted these demands, although not all of them align with its governing vision and could pose challenges to the coalition’s stability going forward.
The alliance between the two parties—alike in some ways, sharply different in others—offers potential benefits and risks for both sides. The JIP brings fresh energy to the LDP, which has struggled to regain momentum since the 2023 election funding scandal, while JIP gains national visibility and leverage to promote Osaka’s interests.
However, the JIP’s young and politically inexperienced lawmakers could create friction within the coalition, and tensions could resurface over regional policy. The two parties have previously clashed over Osaka’s proposed status as a “second metropolis,” a plan the LDP opposed in the past. Political donations and funding reform could become another point of contention. While the parties share common ground on issues such as national security, energy policy, and constitutional reform, they clearly diverge in their structural visions: JIP champions decentralization, whereas the LDP remains the embodiment of centralized authority.
For Takaichi, this alliance represents a far less cohesive arrangement than the one the LDP previously had with Komeito, not least because it functions more as a parliamentary alliance than a true governing coalition. The JIP has declined to take cabinet positions and supports the LDP on an “extra-cabinet” basis, making the partnership inherently more unstable. For now, it remains cautious until it gains confidence within the LDP and sees the agreement fulfilled, noting that it has already been “deceived once by the LDP.”
Conclusion
Takaichi may be Japan’s first female prime minister—remarkable in a country where only 15.7% of politicians are women—but her rise offers little reason for celebration. Her narrow victory shook Japanese politics, driven by hawkish foreign policy and nationalist rhetoric, while offering scant promise for women’s rights. She appointed just two women to nineteen cabinet posts, underscoring that individual breakthroughs do not guarantee systemic change.
Her new minority government now navigates the fallout of losing Komeito’s moderating influence, relying instead on a fragile, transactional partnership with the JIP. Policy differences over decentralization, political funding, and regional power could quickly strain this alliance. While Takaichi aims to restore public trust and assert national identity, she also risks deepening political polarization.
Japan is entering uncharted political territory, not because of her gender, but because of the unstable coalition she leads.
