Australia’s centre-left prime minister Anthony Albanese haswon a second term with a crushing victoryover the opposition, whose leader, Peter Dutton,lost his own seatin the Brisbane suburbs.
Albanese’sLabor partyscored an unexpectedly comfortable win on Saturday, after a five-week election campaign that was dominated by the cost of living and the Donald Trump factor, which appeared to damage Dutton.
At the turn of the year, Labor was struggling in the polls, but Dutton ran a campaign derided by commentators as one of the worst in Australian political history, and failed to clearly dissociate himself from some Trump-like rhetoric and policies.
Albanese, 62, becomes the first Australian prime minister to serve consecutive terms since 2004. The country has had six different prime ministers in two decades after a series of leadership changes amid internal politics.
With counting continuing on Saturday night, Labor was projected to win comfortably more than 76 of the 150 lower house seats to form a majority government, with an increased share of votes bucking a recent trend against the two major parties.
As of Saturday evening, Labor was certain to add to the 77 seats it held going into the election, with the opposition Liberal/NationalCoalitionprojected to receive its lowest ever national vote and to lose further seats.
Meanwhile, most if not all of the inner-city “teal” independents elected at the previous poll in 2022 seemed certain to retain their seats, with several other independents, some in regional areas, having a good chance of adding to their number.
However, it was a disappointing night for the Greens, who were projected to lose all three of the Brisbane seats they sensationally won in 2022, even as their national vote remained static at around 13%. Even the apparently safe Melbourne seat of their leader, Adam Bandt, seemed in a certain amount of jeopardy.
Dutton was first elected in 2001 and is one of the party’s most senior members. He has held a number of ministerial positions, including defence and immigration, since 2013.
He had consistently led in the national polls since the end of 2023, but the US’s decision to place tariffs on Australian exports made associations with Trump detrimental to the opposition party’s brand.
The opposition leader avoided mentioning the US president during the election campaign, even as some of hissenior colleagues referred to Trump’s slogansat political rallies.
Months before the campaign officially kicked off, Dutton hadannounced a government efficiency unitto scale back “waste”, mirroring the Elon Musk-led so-called “department of government efficiency” in the US.
Counting to determine the final shape of the House of Representatives and the Senate (the upper house) will take several days, if not weeks in the case of a few seats.
Voting is compulsory in Australia and is based on a preferential voting system. Voters number candidates in order of their preferences for both houses.
The rise of independent challengers has complicated the counting process, with complex preference flows requiring more time to determine the final two candidates.