When Australians went to the polls on 3 May, analysts predicted a close result. Instead, they witnessed a convincing win and renewed mandate for incumbent Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his centre-left Labor Party. The right-wing opposition – the Liberal-National Coalition – consistently led the polls ahead of the campaign and hoped to reclaim the power it lost in the last election in 2022. But it came a distant second and its leader, Peter Dutton, suffered the personal humiliation of losing his parliamentary seat.

Australia’s complex preferential voting system means counting continues in several constituencies, so results aren’t final. But the message is clear: on the current count, Labor has a strong majority, with 91 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives, parliament’s main chamber; the Coalition has only 40. This commanding majority should ensure stable government over the three years until the next election and gives Labor an opportunity to realise its campaign promises.

As in most recent elections, concerns about the cost of living, from high food prices to the increasingly pressing problem of unaffordable housing, were key voter priorities. Healthcare and migration were other major issues. But the issue of Australia’s relationship with the USA also played a significant role.

The two countries cooperate closely on military and security matters, and the USA is among Australia’s biggest trading partners. With the second Trump administration creating unprecedented international division and instability, the campaign saw Australians face the question of what kind of leader they want to try to manage the relationship. Of the two candidates on offer, they chose the one least like Trump.

Trump’s influence on electoral dynamics

Australia’s election strongly parallels Canada’s just a week before. There, the ruling Liberal Party, the more progressive of the two main parties, had been on track to lose comprehensively to the right-wing Conservative Party.

The Conservatives had led opinion surveys for years: at the start of 2025, polls gave them around twice the support of the Liberals, and that large lead continued even after long-serving Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation on 6 January. But the lead started to narrow as Trump repeatedly called for Canada to give up its sovereignty and become the USA’s 51st state. Polls shifted as Mark Carney took over as Liberal Party leader and prime minister in March, after which he quickly called a snap election.

Carney’s election campaign, under the slogan of ‘Canada Strong’, put the Trump issue front and centre, reaffirming Canada’s sovereignty at every opportunity. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was left on the back foot. A politician skilled at deploying right-wing populist language, he’d made a name for himself by embracing protests by truckers against pandemic restrictions in 2022 that were rife with far-right ideas and emblems. He’d previously borrowed Trump’s rhetoric, repurposing the ‘American First’ slogan into ‘Canada First’.

There are important differences between Poilievre and Trump: while they’re both economically conservative, Poilievre is more liberal on issues such as immigration and abortion and backs Ukraine against Russia’s aggression. His response to Trump’s announcement of his plan to impose tariffs on Canada was to try to position himself as a strongman capable of taking on Trump. But that move may have reinforced perceptions that he was similar to Trump.

Ultimately, both main parties gained seats as smaller party votes were squeezed but the Liberal vote rose by more than its challenger’s, and Poilievre, like Dutton, suffered the indignity of losing his parliamentary seat.

Trump’s tariff policies are impacting on campaigns all over the world. Tariffs were a key issue in Trinidad and Tobago’s 28 April election, which resulted in an opposition victory. In Singapore’s 3 May election, in contrast, public concern about tariffs seems to have worked in favour of the long-running ruling party, which had faced a bigger than usual opposition challenge but may have been perceived as better equipped to manage the economic fallout.

Meanwhile in the first round of Romania’s 5 May presidential election – rerun after the Constitutional Court annulled last year’s vote that saw a far-right candidate come first – being compared to Trump evidently proved advantageous for the new far-right candidate, George Simion. He took first place and is the favourite to win the 18 May second round.

This suggests the Trump effect can  play either way, but what seems clear is that voters in many countries are having to make judgements about whether they want leaders like Trump, while Trump’s controversial policies, particularly on tariffs, are fundamentally changing the conversation, making outcomes harder to predict.

Culture war tactics backfire

In Australia as in Canada, Labor succeeded in portraying Dutton as a miniature version of Trump. His political rhetoric was certainly similar, as he manufactured culture wars and vilified migrants. Dutton’s peak moment of political opportunism came in 2023, when the government fulfilled its promise to hold a referendum on giving Australia’s long-excluded Indigenous people a say in a new consultative body. Dutton exploited the issue for political gain, successfully campaigning against the measure. The campaign was rife with disinformation and racial abuse, leaving Australian society more polarised than before and setting back Indigenous rights.

More recently, Dutton proposed a government efficiency unit similar to that led by Elon Musk and appointed a shadow minister of government efficiency, Jacinta Price. She told a rally she wanted to ‘make Australia great again’ and was photographed wearing a Trump MAGA cap. Dutton also proposed Trump-style policies such as slashing federal government jobs and banning public officials from working from home.

The escalating controversies caused by the Trump administration meant that in the election campaign, what had long been seen as a political advantage became a liability, forcing Dutton onto the defensive as he tried to distance himself from Trump. In trying to win support from potential backers of far-right parties, Dutton also seems to have alienated voters closer to the political centre, particularly women and young people. His culture war politics evidently had little to offer voters more concerned about the high cost of living.

Ultimately many voters went for a quieter, more conventional politician. As in Canada, in a turbulent world and amid an intensifying trade war, the current prime minister seemed a safer bet to many.

There are of course important differences. In Australia, Albanese has already spent three years as prime minister, while in Canada, career economist Carney was a political newcomer just arrived in office, offering a fresher face than his opponent. But in both cases, without the Trump factor, it’s possible voters would have embraced conservative politics with a more right-wing populist tinge. The usual pattern is for voters to punish incumbents when the cost of living is high. In Australia and Canada, Trump’s large shadow disrupted that pattern.

Climate action in the campaign

Australia’s election result could also be a big moment for climate action. Australia is the world’s second-biggest coal exporter, after Indonesia, and one of the world’s highest per capita greenhouse gas emitters. The last Coalition government actively promoted climate denial and pledged to extract coal and retain coal-fired power stations for as long as possible. But Australia, with its particularly vulnerable ecology, has recently experienced many extreme weather events such as droughts, floods and wildfires, made more likely and frequent by climate change.

The 2022 election saw a surge in voter concern about climate change. Teal independents – candidates committed to climate action but with a more economically conservative background – fared well and played an important part in unseating Coalition politicians. Some progress followed in expanding Australia’s renewable energy capacities, legislating for cleaner vehicles and providing tax credits for businesses involved in climate transition. The government also began to repair relations with Pacific Island states, which are on the frontline of climate impacts. Next year it hopes to host the COP31 climate summit, in partnership with its island neighbours.

But this time climate wasn’t much of a campaign issue. The one exception was Dutton’s pledge to invest heavily in nuclear power as an alternative to renewable energies, along with a plan to cancel offshore windfarms. Australia has never had nuclear power, and its development would run contrary to federal law as well as laws in some of its constituent states. Civil society groups united against the nuclear plan. One of Australia’s biggest environmental groups, the Australian Conservation Foundation, assessed the Coalition’s climate and environment policies and gave it a score of just one out of a hundred.

The nuclear plan wasn’t popular with voters. But at the same time, while support for the teal independents appears to have held up, the Greens party has suffered a blow, losing all four of its parliamentary seats; its leader Adam Bandt has, like Dutton, been unseated.

Although the Greens may well end up holding the balance of power in the Senate, parliament’s second chamber, the party’s absence from the House of Representatives means the new government may face significantly reduced parliamentary scrutiny over its climate actions. Australia’s civil society will have to redouble its efforts to hold the government to account over its climate commitments and urge greater ambition.

The defeat of Dutton’s nuclear plan means voters have rejected any idea of reversing renewable energy policies, so the transition must continue. Australia is due to submit a new emissions-cut plan ahead of this year’s COP30 climate summit, offering a key moment to send a strong signal.

Time to respect civic space

As civil society strives to keep up the climate pressure and more generally hold the new government to account, it will call for an improvement in the government’s respect for civic space. Civic freedoms declined under the Coalition government that ruled from 2013 to 2022. While the situation improved to some extent under the first Albanese administration, attacks on protest rights continued, particularly affecting climate protesters and more recently people mobilising in solidarity with Palestine.

In recent years, several climate activists have been jailed for actions such as peaceful roadblock protests and others have been subjected to surveillance. Politicians and police have vilified protesters, aided by major media outlets. Last year, police sought a court ban on one protest on Palestine and used rubber bullets and pepper spray against another, and they’ve continued arresting protesters.

With a clear majority and the opposition in disarray, the Albanese administration should reverse these regressive practices. If the government really wants to distinguish itself from the Trump administration, it should immediately accelerate climate action, work to strengthen Indigenous people’s rights and respect the right to protest.

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