‘History doesn’t repeat,’ Mark Twain is said to have said, ‘but it often rhymes.’ And there could hardly be a better example of two events rhyming than the recent Canadian and Australian elections.
In both countries, the centre-right was flying high in the polls, with leads of up to 20% in Canada and 10% in Australia. In both countries, those leads had evaporated by the time the election took place, leading to victories for centre-left parties that had only recently been counted out. In both countries, hard-charging conservative leaders who had seemed on the cusp of becoming prime minister were instead out of parliament, having lost their seats.
What happened?
No election result is monocausal, and these elections were no exception. Canada’s centre-left Liberals got a boost after the once-popular Justin Trudeau fell on his sword and Mark Carney, his technocratic successor, proved a hit with voters. Peter Dutton, the leader of Australia’s centre-right coalition, was never a popular figure.
But commentators across the English-speaking world have been pointing to one man as playing a decisive role in both these elections: Donald Trump.
Trump’s impact is especially clear in Canada, which saw a resurgence of patriotism after Trump called for it to become the US’s ‘51st state.’ The Liberals, led by the cosmopolitan Carney, were the beneficiaries.
This was largely because of the perceived Trumpishness of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who railed against the World Economic Forum and pledged to defund the state-run Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Dutton set up a ‘government efficiency’ platform that echoed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Centre-right parties should obviously learn from this, especially in terms of presentation. Poilievre’s Trump-like habit of adding derisive epithets to his opponent’s names (‘Carbon-tax Carney’) was never likely to go down well in a country with a notorious penchant for politeness.
But there is also a danger of over-correcting. The Conservatives’ share of the vote in Canada was the highest since 1988, with the Liberals limited to a minority government. In Australia, the coalition won 32% of first-preference votes, only 3% fewer than the victorious Labour party. This suggests that a robust policy platform can win a healthy share of the vote.
As voters across the Anglosphere have made clear, though, there is a line – the line that divides robust but civilised democratic politics from Trump’s MAGAlomania.