G'day...for Labor.

Returning Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese

Next up on our electoral round-up is Australia.  The land down under is also the land of compulsory voting, giving Australia a phenomenal voter turnout of over 90% (and if you don't vote, you face an A$20 fine).  Several weeks ago, Australia went to the polls and endorsed Anthony Albanese's centre-left Australian Labor Party.  The ALP won a landslide victory and gave Albanese a second consecutive victory - something no other Australian Prime Minister has accomplished in over 20 years.  This month, Albanese expanded on his victory from 2022 and gained 16 seats, allowing him to form a majority government. While Canada's Liberal Party was only able to form a minority, there are several similarities on both sides of the Pacific.

When the election was called, opinion polling had the centre-left ALP and the broadly right-wing Liberal-National Coalition neck-and-neck. When polled against all parties the L/NP were in first place with 35.5% and Labor on 29.8% (1). However, when asked about a choice between the two main parties or the two parties able to form a government, the result flipped to a 50/50 split.  This is important in Australian politics because the House of Representatives uses preferential voting.  In this system, voters rank their choices, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated, and their votes are transferred to the next preference or that voter's second choice.  This process is repeated in an instant runoff until a candidate emerges with most votes.  Given the disparity between the first poll and the second poll, it seems as though Australia's political left had more support than the right.  Like Canada, the campaign coalesced around the two major parties with the centre-left increasing their vote share during the campaign.

What were the significant issues in the eyes of Australian voters?  Again, like Canada, it was largely domestic issues, such as cost of living.  However, unlike Canada, Trump was more in the background, a looming threat rather than an existential one.  National security took a backseat, but when foreign policy was a topic for discussion, it quickly put the Liberal party leadership into the spotlight with comparisons to Trump, especially as Liberals suggested plans akin to the Elon Musk led Department of Government Efficiency.  Partially due to this, voters thought Albanese would be better to handle Australia's foreign policy over Peter Dutton, the leader of the Liberal/National Coalition by a margin of 15%.  Australian also no longer trust the United States to act responsibly by a margin of 2:1.  

Like in Canada, we see a right-wing party adopt Trumpian rhetoric and campaign tactics to woo voters who largely disagree with both. And like in Canada, those political leaders are forced to sit in time out, as Mr. Dutton not only led his party to a massive defeat, but several safe seats, including his own! 

Both Canada and Australia have shown that American-style politics have a limited appeal to voters.  When faced with a choice between a classically liberal status quo and a more aggressive style of conservatism built around cultural issues, voters on the left rally around the best chance to form a sympathetic government with centrist voters essentially voting against the Conservatives (or the confusingly named Liberals) to reject parties seen as too close to Trump. Romania over this past weekend also confirmed a shorter ceiling for Trumpian nationalists, with the centric Presidential candidate winning a larger than expected victory as the nationalist George Simon grew his support less than 6% against the centrist Nicusor Dan who rose from 21 to 54% of the vote between the first and second rounds. 

While this has been the case in national elections so far, next week, I'll examine local elections in the United Kingdom that may buck this trend.