A voter arrives at a polling station at the Bossley Park Public School in Sydney on Saturday.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his ruling Labor Party were trailing in polls until recently, but his conservative rival was hurt by Trumpian tendencies.SYDNEY — Australia’s center-left government convincingly won reelection Saturday in a remarkable turnaround driven partly by anger over President Donald Trump’s disruptive trade war and its impact on the close U.S. military ally.Anthony Albanese became the first Australian prime minister to win a second term in more than two decades as his Labor Party dramatically increased its parliamentary majority. It marked a stunning comeback for the progressive leader, who trailed in the polls two months ago.
In a jubilant victory speech, the 62-year-old struck a tone of unity while also alluding to his opponent’s failed embrace of Trump-like policies.
“We do not need to beg or borrow or copy from anywhere else,” Albanese said to a raucous Sydney crowd. “We do not seek out our inspiration overseas. We find it right here in our values and in our people.”Trump’s tariffs — first 25 percent on Australia’s aluminum and steel, then 10 percent across the board — had driven voters toward the even-keeled incumbent and away from his conservative opponent, Peter Dutton, whose plans and rhetoric had echoed the American president, said Sean Kelly, a political columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald.“Trump has absolutely dominated the trajectory of this election,” Kelly said, adding that the global uncertainty unleashed by Trump had made “Albanese’s boringness quite an appealing commodity.”
With roughly half of the votes counted, Labor appeared on track to increase its majority in the lower chamber of Parliament from 78 seats to at least 87, with more than a dozen races yet to be called.
In a shock that appeared to underscore Trump’s impact, one of the seats Labor picked up was Dutton’s.The election was the second in less than a week to be upended by the trade war after Canada’s center-left government rode a wave of anti-Trump anger to reelection on Monday.
“Around the world, Mr. Trump’s unpopularity presents an opportunity to center-left political parties,” said Michael Fullilove, executive director of the Lowy Institute, a Sydney think tank.
The success of Britain’s upstart anti-immigration party in local elections Thursday had raised expectations that Australia’s far-right One Nation party might perform strongly. Instead, it appeared to make only small gains.
The biggest story from Australia’s election was the collapse by Dutton, the leader of a conservative coalition made up of his Liberal Party and the rural National Party. He became the first opposition leader to lose his seat in an Australian federal election.The former police officer had waged a Trump-like culture war against diversity programs and “woke” school programing, even promising an Australian version of the U.S. DOGE Service.
But as Trump’s tariffs shook Australians’ faith in the United States and raised fears of a recession, nicknames like “DOGE-y Dutton” and “Temu Trump” began to bite, analysts said.
“One factor we can all acknowledge and recognize is the Trump factor,” Liberal senator James Paterson told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. as results started to arrive. “It was devastating in Canada for the Conservatives where the Canadian Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre lost 20 points over the course of a few months. And I think it has been a factor here.”
Dutton was also hurt by a series of missteps, including late policy announcements, embarrassing misstatements and flip-flops on key issues.In some ways, Albanese’s political resurrection resembled that of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose political fate had also turned with Trump’s tariffs.
Canada had received rougher treatment than Australia, however, and Albanese’s response has been more restrained. His stiffest retort was to call Trump’s tariffs “not the act of a friend.”
That is partly because Australia is economically less intertwined with the United States than Canada, and it didn’t feel the same immediate sting of tariffs. But it also reflects Australia’s long-standing dependence on U.S. military might.
Both Albanese and Dutton, a former defense minister, have doubled down on the security alliance with the United States, including a deal for Australia to buy nuclear submarines to push back on growing Chinese military assertiveness in the region.But Beijing is also Canberra’s biggest trading partner and Australia wants to keep ships of its iron ore flowing to China, even as Australia buys weapons from Washington.
“The biggest challenge for the next government is to manage the strategic triangle between Washington, Beijing and Canberra,” Fullilove said. “The U.S. is our great security ally and China is our most important economic partner — and they are currently at loggerheads.”
Australian elections rarely revolve around foreign affairs, he noted, but both Albanese and Dutton did their best to avoid international issues on the campaign trail.
“We are a nation of 27 million people occupying a continent far from our historic sources of security and prosperity,” he said. “The international order on which we rely is fraying. We need to respond properly to the changes in the world.”
Albanese will now have to guide Australia through a potentially protracted U.S.-China trade war, while also pursuing his progressive domestic agenda.The pace and ambition of that agenda has sometimes been criticized in a country facing cost-of-living and housing crises, Kelly said. Even before he first became prime minister in 2022, however, Albanese had styled himself as a more low-key leader — an intentional departure from the intensity of covid lockdown leadership and the chaos of Trump.“What he identified a long time ago … was the idea that voters had conflict fatigue,” Kelly said. “And as it happened, that played to his strengths. He’s not a great showman. He’s not a great speech giver. He’s not a flashy guy. You could say it was making a virtue out of potential weaknesses, but that’s what a good politician does.”
Saturday’s reelection was a vindication of that slow, steady and somewhat subdued approach, he added.
The result was an extraordinary reversal from six months ago, when Albanese trailed in the polls after the biggest stumble of his term: the emphatic defeat of an October 2023 constitutional referendum to create an Indigenous advisory body, or “voice,” to Parliament.
Dutton opposed the idea, which essentially sealed its fate in a nation where such referendums almost never succeed without bipartisan support.The referendum’s defeat buoyed Dutton but taught him the wrong lesson, Kelly said, by encouraging the conservative to continue focusing on culture war issues instead of hammering away at his winning argument, the cost of living.
In the final weeks of the campaign, polls showed Albanese with a steady 3 to 5 percent lead, enough for the prime minister to appear on a podcast called “Bloody Brilliant Beers” normally more attuned to pale ales than politics.
By the eve of the election, Albanese was so confident he was campaigning in Dutton’s own electorate — a bit of swagger from the “boring” politician that paid off.
At his victory party, the prime minister and his deputies were characteristically disciplined with their comments. Trump was never mentioned, although the American president loomed over the speech, as he had the campaign.
“Some might want to mimic the worst of other countries,” said Foreign Minister Penny Wong as she introduced Albanese, adding that the prime minister instead “backs what’s best about our country.”
Albanese struck a similar note, touching on the global economic uncertainty without mentioning Trump.
“Australians,” he said simply, “have chosen to face global challenges the Australian way.”
0 Comments