The US President was indeed the ‘elephant in the polls’ in Canada and Australia where the candidates he backed were soundly defeated
As Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese won a historic second term for his government while becoming the first PM to secure consecutive electoral wins since 2004, it is Albanese 1, Mark Carney 1 and Donald Trump 0. The US President was indeed the ‘elephant in the polls’ in Canada and Australia where the candidates he backed were soundly defeated.
The one who may have escaped the Trump ‘curse’ is Nigel Farage in the UK whose Reform may have won one seat to Parliament by the narrowest of margins but is set to rock the two-party system that has featured UK politics for centuries when the next general elections come up.
Down Under, the incumbent Albanese, who was bracing to climb a mountain, may have been the one most surprised by the landslide win for Labor, which might end up with clear majority in the 150-seat parliament, even as the Coalition led by Peter Dutton was trounced with Dutton losing his seat that he had held for 24 years. The incumbency curse may have bundled out governments across the world, from the US to the UK to South Africa, but the Australians appear to have chosen stability over change at a time of global uncertainty induced by Trump while showing the door to such ideas as slashing the civil service, clamping down rigorously on migrants, denying Aboriginal rights and introducing nuclear power and cutting down on energy from renewable sources.
The backlash against a swing to the far right is not so surprising because the Australians are seen to be supporting the idea of a party melding liberal and conservative ideas and staying centrist rather than jumping to the far left ideologically in the modern world that is already seeing them suffer from the cost-of-living crisis, costlier homes and no discernible rise in jobs. Such support has helped keep off the populists from taking over and attempting Trump-like chaos in the name of change.
