Any reference to foreign influence on elections, and chances are that Russia or North Korea would spring to mind. But the Donald Trump administration in the United States, or more specifically, the American President himself, is unwittingly a new contender in this business of influencing elections, having already upended one national poll in Canada and impacted another federal election in Australia on Saturday.
In Canada, in a space of a few weeks, Trump’s provocations almost single-handedly pushed Mark Carney, a career central banker and a political novice on his first ever run for public office, to the country’s top job — much against the run of play. Australia is next.
On Saturday, the 2025 Australian federal election to elect members of the 48th Parliament of Australia resulted in the incumbent centre-left government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese being sharply boosted by Trump’s belligerence over the past few weeks. Going into Saturday’s polls, Albanese led the centre-left Labour Party and overcome challenger Peter Dutton, who helmed an alliance of right-leaning conservative parties called the Liberal-National Coalition. Albanese’s Labour is declared to have won the election, national broadcaster ABC said later on Saturday in a projection based on early results.
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Dutton, like Canadian opposition Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, was ahead in the polls just before the start of Trump’s presidency. The Canadian Conservative leader’s loud populism and aggressive tactics were subsequently likened to Trump’s behaviour, including Poilievere’s promised crackdown on drugs, attacks on wokeism and his ‘Canada First’ slogan.
Labour Win in Australia
Amid the escalating trade war fanned by the White House, the Australian public, just like in Canada, seemed to have rallied around a leader who is seen to be better positioned to take Trump’s challenge head-on. Albanese had promised to do exactly that. “The two conversations I’ve had with President Trump are ones in which I stand up for Australia’s national interest and I will always do that,” Albanese told reporters as the election campaign got underway. When the nation is coming under fire from Trump, the natural response often is to just rally around the leader. That seems to have happened in Canada, and likely unfolded in Australia.
An Albanese win is a milestone in more ways than one. A sitting Australian prime minister had not led a party to consecutive election victories since John Howard, a conservative, way back in the year 2004. The other important takeaways from the Albanese win, coming in the wake of Carney’s triumph in Canada, is that it would mark a break from the electoral trends visible across most other countries: the general pattern where incumbents have mostly lost their mantles to challengers and that of a discernible rightward shift in voter choices. Trump was pretty much the third candidate in both these elections, especially with his escalatory pronouncements over the last couple of months, a first-generation immigrant Australian told The Indian Express.
Another really significant point is the emergence of younger voters, which was a big factor in Canada. In Australia too, according to the Associated Press, this is the first election where younger voters outnumberd Baby Boomers. The younger voters, especially migrants, are inclined to vote against the Right leaning parties. About a third of the voters in Australia — where voting is mandatory — said they were less likely to vote for the opposition Conservative Party leader Dutton because of their negative views about Trump, according to a Resolve Political Monitor poll released two weeks ago and quoted by the Washington Post. A poll published Friday in The Australian showed the Labour party leading 52.5 per cent-47.5 per cent against the Liberal-National coalition.
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Too Trumpian
Like Canada’s Poilievre, Dutton too was widely seen as echoing the Trumpian rhetoric, including statements regarding “wokeness,” a campaign focused on restricting immigration and his promise to cut the federal government, quite like Trump’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) experiment. Albanese’s Labour had warned that Dutton’s coalition would make massive cuts to public services to pay for its stated plans to set up state-owned nuclear power plants, which Labour said would be tantamount to copying DOGE’s promise to cut more than one in five government jobs. “We don’t need to copy America or anywhere else. We need the Australian way,” Albanese said on Friday.
Just as Australia’s Liberal-national coalition was ahead three months ago, in Canada, the opposition Conservative Party victory seemed like a foregone conclusion, while the ruling Liberal Party was pretty much written off until late January. Then Trump started to show his imprint on this election in Canada, threatening a trade war, his repeated calls to annex Canada and make it the 51st US state, which he repeated again the morning of the Canadian polls in a social media post.
Carney’s comeback was somewhat unprecedented in Canadian politics. Albanese has now replicated that comeback from behind. And like Canada, the impact of Typhoon Trump, as they’re calling it Down Under, is indelible in this federal election too.
For countries such as India, the continuation of the regime in Canberra is being seen as a net positive. Both countries are in the process of upgrading an early harvest trade deal signed in December 2022 into a full-fledged Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement or ECTA. Discussion on this have been ongoing and continuancy in the political regimes on both sides is important. Also, Australia is an important strategic ally and has, under Albanese, advocated the middle-of-the-line approach on issues, including on coping with the Trump administration’s overtures and in dealing with China.
