Hope on the Horizon – Lessons for Europe stemming from the Australian and Canadian elections
1. Within a week of each other, Australia and Canada held federal elections that produced remarkably similar results: the incumbent parties of the centre-left winning power; their Trump-curious conservative opponents not only losing the elections, but also seeing their leaders lose their parliamentary seats. In what has been a pretty gloomy period for this Blog’s European audience – the electoral situation in Romania, recent Reform wins in UK local elections and the continued march of the far-right in France and Germany – this piece seeks to offer you all a bit of hope. I suggest that at least one of these election outcomes ought not be viewed as one-off, Trump induced result, but rather as a potential inflection point with important political, legal and constitutional lessons for Europe. First to the results, then to some analysis of potential causes, before going on to the lessons.
2. The Canadian election took place on April 28th. Turnout was a record for this century at 69 per cent. After trailing by 27 per cent in opinion polls, the Liberal Government, led by a new leader in Mark Carney, came a handful of seats short of winning majority government (they won 169 seats when they needed 172 for a majority). The Liberals achieved an 11.1 per cent increase in their vote share (43.7 per cent), while, despite also receiving a 7.5 per cent increase in their vote (41.3 per cent), the Conservatives only managed to snavel 144 seats. Both parties took votes and seats from the minor parties, with the New Democratic Party (the NDP is to the left of the Liberal Party), suffering the largest losses. Conservative Opposition Leader, Pierre Poilievre, also shockingly lost his seat in Parliament.
The Australian election took place on May 3, with counting continuing. The total number of Australians enrolled to vote was at approximately 98 per cent going into the election. After trailing at certain points in opinion polls throughout the past year, the Labor Government, led by Anthony Albanese, won one of the largest majorities in Australian political history (currently on track to win over 90 seats in a 150 seat Parliament), from a primary vote percentage of 34.7 per cent. The Coalition (made up of the Liberal and National Parties, which in Australia are on the conservative side of politics) suffered a catastrophic defeat, down to 40-odd seats, from a primary vote of 32.2 per cent. Labor took seats from both the Coalition and Greens party, with the leader of the Coalition, Peter Dutton, losing his seat in Parliament, along with the Greens Leader, Adam Bandt.
3. While Trump loomed large in both campaigns, a lot of the international commentary regarding his effect on the Australian campaign has been overblown. In Canada, it is clear that it was the re-election of Trump, US tariffs and the dumping of former Prime Minister Trudeau for a mild-mannered new leader of the Liberal Party that turned their electoral fortunes around. We shouldn’t overlook, however, the importance of Prime Minister Carney’s decision to dump the Government’s carbon tax, and his re-positioning the Liberal Party to the right of where it had been under Trudeau on a range of economic issues, to the ability of the Liberals to sap some of energy from the Conservative campaign. This was only compounded by the successful painting of Poilievre as Trump-lite, and any vote for the NDP as a risk of ending up with a Conservative government.
The Australian election had a strong domestic focus, dominated by debates over energy policy, housing, workplace relations policy and cultural issues. The Coalition went to the election promising Australians a nuclear energy future, a massive reduction in the size of the public service and a desire to move away from a culture of working from home, as well as a promise by Mr Dutton to reduce the prevalence of indigenous welcoming ceremonies at official events. The Labor Party presented a platform focused on continuing the renewable and gas-led energy transition, debt-relief for tertiary students, universal free childcare and the maintenance of free healthcare, and a host of other tax-tweaks and changes. At a time of volatility abroad, culture war fatigue after a brutal referendum in 2023 on indigenous constitutional recognition, and a desire for continued progress on carbon reduction efforts, it was the Labor offer that won the day. This was helped enormously by a universally acknowledged woeful Coalition campaign.
4. Despite Canada and Australia possessing similar colonial histories, Westminster-style parliaments, and similar political cultures (although it is the centre left that has held power for longer in Canada, and the opposite in Australia), the electoral systems of both are chalk and cheese, which goes someway to explaining the difference in the magnitude of the Labor win.
Canadian elections adhere to a voluntary, electorate-based, first-past-the-post system. Australian elections operate according to a mandatory, electorate-based, compulsory preferential voting system (in the Senate it is optional preferential). This difference results in an average voter turnout in Australia of over 90 per cent, with those 90 per cent of Australians having to mark on their House of Representatives ballots their first choice through to their last choice of the candidates listed. The results produced tend to favour centrist parties, as they generally attract highest number of first, second and third preferences. In Canada, on the other hand, in addition to seeing a smaller electorate voting (percentage-wise), due to its first-past-the-post system, while there is the potential for vote splitting to lead to more extreme candidates emerging, its system has also often seen the party coming in second in terms of the popular vote, win far more seats in the parliament because of a more efficient distribution.
So, comparing the election results, despite the Labor Party in Australia only winning approximately 3 per centage points more in first preference votes than its opposition, it won 55 per cent of the two-party preferred vote, which translated to it winning 50 more seats than the Coalition. In Canada, the 2 per cent difference in vote between the two major parties saw the Liberals win 14 more seats than its opponents. If we only looked at the first preference votes in the Australian election the Coalition would have won a host of additional seats.
5. There are three core lessons European political leaders concerned with the threat the authoritarian far-right pose to liberal democracy, from the recent Canadian and Australian elections.
- Embrace electoral reform over judicial intervention
While multiple first past the post round-based systems (France and Romania etc), and list-based proportional representation systems (Netherlands, Germany and the EU) have served many countries well in quelling the potential for the extremes of politics to rise and take power in ordinary times, these are not ordinary times. Indeed, despite the success of the Liberals in Canada at this election, they need only look to the success of Reform in the UK local elections to see what its electoral system is also capable of producing. Accordingly, and to the extent that it is constitutionally possible, European jurisdictions should begin to look at reforming their electoral processes to ensure that the most number of voters possible see the most number of their preferences counted towards the final result. Compulsory voting, combined with compulsory preferential voting, rewards those parties that appeal to the widest possible swathe of the electorate, rather than those who manage to get out their vote, or suppress the vote of the other side. To advocate for a change in the electoral system to something resembling something like the Australian system is to advocate for a widening and a deepening of the franchise. It is to use the ballot box, rather than the courts, to try and deal with what is ultimately a democratic rather than a legal phenomenon. To resort to the Courts is to, in many respects, admit democratic defeat.
- Demography won’t defeat the electoral threat unless it’s matched with electoral reform
One of the big stories to come out of the US elections, the recent German elections, and now from the Canadian election, is the fact that young people, aged under 45, and against common wisdom, are voting in large numbers for conservative and far-right parties. For the AfD, voters aged under 45 proved to be its largest demographic voting block at the last election. This is of concern as the millennial generation, and generation ‘z’ are fast becoming the largest voting block (see the US example here) as the baby boomer generation slowly dies out. The Australian election result, however, potential throws a spanner in the works. In Australia, the Labor Party is on track to win the vote of millennials and generation z’s by a large margin. While one could put this down to cultural, educational or political differences between Australia and these other jurisdictions, another potential explanation is compulsory voting. The youth voter turnout in Canada over the past number of elections has averaged over 25 per cent lower than those aged 65-plus. In Australia, the figure hovers around the 90 per cent mark. So, what we are actually potentially seeing is a non-representative sample of the political leanings of young voters. It is not that young people are more right-wing than their generational peers, but rather that those who tend to come out to vote are motivated by the extremes, with the extreme right rather than the extreme left the most prevalent alternative voice in many western liberal democracies.
- Outrage fatigue is real and ought to be strategically leveraged
In both the Canadian and the Australian elections we saw the governing parties turn to the language of kindness, respect and levelheadedness to combat the efforts of their opponents to maintain the rage. Attempts by the Coalition in Australia to blame the ‘hate media’ (non-Murdoch owned press) for their lack of policy cut-through, and Poilievre’s repetition of various hyperbolic statements, fell flat with voters. Culture war issues lacked electoral currency. For the first time in many decades, immigration was not a major issue of debate during the Australian election, despite a massive blow-out in permanent intake numbers. Whether this is indicative of a wider shift in electoral sentiment or not is of course impossible to determine, but during incredibly turbulent times across the globe, and especially in Europe, perhaps the promise of a steady, competent, quiet hand, could also provide a model for European leaders who are up against loud opponents proposing radical change.
6. There is hope on the liberal democratic horizon in the form of Australia and Canada. While the Canadian election result may be viewed as a one-off Trump induced outcome, it is much more difficult to say the same for Australia. In no way a silver bullet to the woes of certain European liberal democracies, there is much to learn from the ability of the Australian electoral system to drive politics to the centre. There is also much to learn from the success of the tenor of the Canadian Liberal and Australian Labor Party campaigns. Lessons are only of value if they are heeded, and there is much to heed from what has just occurred.