Turnout: 58.51%
About this election
The House of Councillors election of 20 July 2025 was a watershed defeat for the governing coalition. The Liberal Democratic Party, led by prime minister Shigeru Ishiba, won just 39 of the 125 seats contested, and with Komeito (8) the coalition fell to 122 of the 248 seats — below a majority in the upper house for the first time since the LDP's founding in 1955. Coming nine months after the coalition had also lost its lower-house majority, the result left the LDP governing as a minority in both chambers. The nationalist Sanseitō surged to 14 seats and the Democratic Party for the People to 17, while the Constitutional Democratic Party held at 22. Turnout rose to 58.51%.
The upper house renews half its 248 seats every three years, so in 2025 the LDP–Komeito coalition was defending a large class of seats it had won in its strong 2019 performance and needed about 50 to keep a majority. Falling well short left Ishiba dependent on opposition votes in both houses to pass any legislation — an unprecedented bind for a postwar LDP prime minister, and one that immediately raised questions about how long he could survive.
Of the 125 seats contested, 75 were elected in the 45 prefectural districts and 50 by nationwide open-list proportional representation. The single-member districts use first-past-the-post and the multi-member districts single non-transferable vote, while voters cast a separate party or candidate vote for the national proportional tier. The map shades each prefectural district by its leading party. The LDP led 26 districts — far fewer than in previous cycles — as the Constitutional Democrats, the Democratic Party for the People and independents carried many of the rest; the merged Tottori–Shimane and Tokushima–Kōchi districts are shown identically in both prefectures.
The campaign was dominated by the cost of living — above all a sharp spike in the price of rice, the country's staple, which roughly doubled over the preceding year — and by immigration. Real wages had failed to keep pace with inflation, and the voters who had abandoned the LDP in 2024 did not return. Much of the protest vote flowed not to the established centre-left but to Sanseitō, a populist-nationalist party whose "Japanese First" slogan and warnings about foreign residents and tourism attracted disaffected younger and rural voters, especially men, in a campaign waged heavily on social media.
The LDP–Komeito coalition was challenged from the centre and left by the Constitutional Democratic Party under Yoshihiko Noda, the surging Democratic Party for the People led by Yuichiro Tamaki, the Japanese Communist Party and Reiwa Shinsengumi; and from the populist right by Sanseitō, the Conservative Party of Japan and Nippon Ishin no Kai. The tech-focused start-up party Team Mirai, founded by the engineer Takahiro Anno, won its first seat in the proportional tier.
Ishiba, already weakened by the 2024 lower-house defeat, struggled to project authority over rice prices and a tariff dispute with the United States, while the fragmentation of the opposition meant the anti-LDP vote no longer flowed to a single rival. The rise of Sanseitō in particular drew support away from the governing coalition's own right flank, splintering the conservative electorate that the LDP had long taken for granted.
Ishiba initially insisted he would stay on to avoid a political vacuum during the tariff negotiations, but pressure within the LDP mounted, and the twin defeats of 2024–25 set in motion the leadership change that brought Sanae Takaichi to the party presidency and the premiership later in 2025. The election confirmed a fragmenting party system in which a multiplying field of opposition and minor parties — rather than a single coherent alternative — was steadily eroding the dominance the LDP had enjoyed for most of seven decades.
The breakout story was Sanseitō, which had won a single seat in 2022 and now returned fourteen, becoming a genuine force almost overnight. Founded in 2020 and grown largely through YouTube and other social media during the pandemic, the party combined a "Japanese First" nationalism, scepticism toward immigration and tourism, and unorthodox positions on health and food policy. Its success drew comparisons with the populist right elsewhere in the democratic world and was widely attributed to economic grievance, distrust of the established parties and a sophisticated online operation that reached voters the mainstream parties had neglected. Whether it would consolidate or fade, its surge reshaped the terms of debate on immigration and national identity well beyond its seat count.
Turnout of 58.51% was the highest for an upper-house election since 2013, reflecting unusually high engagement driven by cost-of-living anger and the rise of new parties.
Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (Sōmushō) and NHK — soumu.go.jp.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.