Riding the wave of his newly gained clout following last month’s general election, Democratic Party for the People leader Yuichiro Tamaki presented to Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba on Wednesday his party’s energy policy proposal — which includes the building of more nuclear power plants — ahead of the government’s triennial revision of its national energy strategy.

Tamaki’s meeting with Ishiba came amid growing momentum for cooperation between the opposition DPP and the Ishiba-led ruling coalition on economic policy and tax reform. It’s rare for the leader of an opposition party to hold one-on-one talks with the prime minister over a specific policy.

“Rather than framing it as an either/or between renewable energy and nuclear power, I believe it is extremely important to strengthen all stable power sources, particularly those we can produce domestically, from the perspective of energy security,” Tamaki told Ishiba after handing him his party’s proposal.

He then noted how the current energy plan — compiled in 2021, a decade after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant — explicitly refers to the need to reduce the country’s dependence on nuclear energy.

This stance needs to be reviewed to maximize the use of nuclear energy, Tamaki said, demanding further government support for the training of human resources and technological development.

Tamaki has been a longtime advocate of nuclear power and the reactivation of Japan’s nuclear power plants. In its manifesto for the last election, the DPP pushed for nuclear power, describing it as a clean and reliable source of energy that can contribute to drastically improving the country’s energy supply and reducing its dependence on imports.

During the meeting, Tamaki urged the government to resume operations of halted nuclear power plants and build new ones as a way to decarbonize the power sector and secure a stable energy supply.

Labor unions in the energy sector are a major pool of electoral support for the DPP. The party’s electoral affairs chairman, Yoshifumi Hamano — who also attended Wednesday’s meeting — is a former Kansai Electric Power union member.

“Stable, affordable and safe” were the words Ishiba used to describe energy sources Japan needs for the future in his meeting with Tamaki.

When he announced his candidacy for the LDP presidency in late August, he voiced his skepticism toward an overreliance on nuclear power.

The government is reportedly expected to present a draft of its next Strategic Energy Plan — set to pave the way for the country’s energy policy through fiscal 2040 — within the next month, before formalizing it by the end of the fiscal year in March.

Last week, the DPP struck an agreement with the LDP and its junior coalition partner, Komeito, over the government’s economic stimulus package ー backed by a supplementary budget proposal slated for approval in the parliamentary session that will convene starting Thursday.

The DPP’s pet proposal ー raising the current threshold for income tax exemption — made it into the final proposal, with reports even suggesting Ishiba might directly allude to it in his policy speech in parliament on Friday. With that, the three parties also agreed to measures to mitigate the rising price of energy ー a policy that experts have said goes against the country’s decarbonization goals.

In separate negotiations between the three parties over tax reform ahead of the drafting of the budget for fiscal 2025, there is still a wide gap between the ruling coalition and the DPP, which has requested a temporary reduction in consumption tax from the current 10% to 5%, something the LDP has opposed.