2026 Japanese general election

Early general elections were held in Japan on 8 February 2026 in all constituencies, including proportional blocks, to elect all 465 seats of the House of Representatives, the lower house of the National Diet.

The election took place nearly four months into Sanae Takaichi's tenure as Prime Minister of Japan, which began on 21 October after she won the 2025 Liberal Democratic Party presidential election and formed the Liberal Democratic Party–Japan Innovation Party coalition (LDP–JIP). The election also saw the debut of the newly formed Centrist Reform Alliance (CRA), a new political party formed as a merger between the primary opposition Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP) and Komeito, the LDP's former longtime coalition partner. Takaichi described the election as a public referendum on her leadership as prime minister, and of the LDP–JIP coalition.

The LDP won a historic landslide victory, with the party regaining its majority in the House and setting a new postwar record for the most seats won by a single party with 316 seats. This gave the party a two-thirds supermajority in its own right, and surpassed the previous record of 308 seats won by the Democratic Party of Japan in 2009 and the LDP record of 300 seats won in 1986. Meanwhile, the CRA severely underperformed, losing more than two-thirds of its pre-election seats and leading to the resignations of party co-leaders Yoshihiko Noda and Tetsuo Saito after the election. Other parties that gained seats included the ultraconservative and far-right party Sanseitō and the new e-democracy party Team Mirai.

Analysts credited the LDP's victory to Takaichi's high personal popularity at the time of the election, particularly among young voters and conservatives who had previously defected from the party, as well as to CDP and Komeito voters who opposed their parties' merger declining to support the CRA. The Economist described the result as a personal mandate for Takaichi, and a repudiation of the CRA. The LDP's victory marked a reversal of fortune from the 2023–2024 slush fund scandal that had cost the party its majority in the previous election, with 41 of the 43 LDP candidates linked to the scandal winning their races.