‘Third candidate’: After Canada, how Trump looms large over Australia’s election | Business News

Any mention of foreign influence on elections, and Russia or North Korea are likely the first countries that spring to mind. However, the Donald Trump administration in the United States—more specifically, the President himself—has, perhaps unwittingly, emerged as a new player in this sphere. He has already upended one election in Canada and appears poised to influence another in Australia.

In Canada, within a span of just a few weeks, Trump’s provocations almost single-handedly pushed Mark Carney, a career central banker on his first ever run for public office, to the country’s top job, much against the run of play. Australia could be next.

On Saturday, the 2025 Australian federal election got underway, with the incumbent center-left government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appearing to have been boosted by Trump’s belligerence over the past few weeks. Heading into the polls, Albanese leads the centre-left Labour Party over challenger Peter Dutton, who helms an alliance of right-leaning conservative parties known as the Liberal-National Coalition.

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Amid the escalating trade war fanned by the White House, the Australian public, just like in Canada, seems to be rallying around a leader who can take Trump’s challenge head-on. Albanese has 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 began.

When the nation comes under fire from Trump, the natural response often is to just rally around the leader. That seems to have happened in Canada, and is likely to unfold in Australia.

Labour Win in Australia

An Albanese victory would be significant in more ways than one. No sitting Australian prime minister has led their party to back-to-back election wins since John Howard, a conservative, in 2004.

Another key takeaway from a projected Albanese win—coming on the heels of Carney’s triumph in Canada—is that it would mark a departure from prevailing electoral trends across several countries: the widespread pattern of incumbents being unseated by challengers, and a noticeable shift to the right in voter preferences. Trump has pretty much emerged as the third candidate in both these elections over the last couple of months, a second generation immigrant Australian told The Indian Express.

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Among other significant factors is the emergence of younger voters, which played a major role in Canada. In Australia as well, this is the first election in which younger voters outnumber Baby Boomers, according to the news agency Associated Press. These younger voters tend to lean away from right-leaning parties. Roughly a third of voters in Australia, where voting is mandatory, said they were less likely to support opposition Conservative leader Peter Dutton because of their views on Trump, according to a Resolve Political Monitor poll released two weeks ago and cited by The Washington Post. A separate poll published Friday in The Australian showed the Labour Party leading the Liberal-National Coalition 52.5 per cent to 47.5 per cent.

Dutton, like Canadian Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, was ahead in the polls just before the start of Trump’s presidency. Poilievre’s loud populism and aggressive tactics were likened to Trump’s behavior, including his promised crackdown on drugs, attacks on ‘wokeism’ and his ‘Canada First’ slogan.

‘Too Trumpian’

Dutton too was widely seen as echoing Trumpian rhetoric, including his statements about “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 has warned that Dutton’s coalition would make massive cuts to services to pay for its stated plans to set up state-owned nuclear power plants, which Labour said would be tantamount to mimicking DOGE’s promise to cut more than one in five federal public sector jobs. “We don’t need to copy America or anywhere else. We need the Australian way,” Albanese said on Friday.

Dutton was careful to bracket his coalition as the underdog, a week before the polls. “We are the underdog and I think a lot of people will be expressing a real protest vote at this election as well because the prime minister believes he’s won this election,” Dutton said last week.

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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 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 could be in line to replicate that comeback in Australia from behind. And like Canada, the impact of ‘Typhoon Trump’, as they’re calling it Down Under, is indelible in this case too.