After Canada, the anti-Trump backlash moves to Australia – Ishaan Tharoor

Mark Carney has led the Liberals to victory in the Canadian federal election. Photo/ Getty Images

THREE KEY FACTS

• Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives lost Canada’s national election, with Poilievre also losing his parliamentary seat.
• Mark Carney’s leadership and nationalism stoked by Donald Trump’s actions contributed to the Liberals’ comeback.
• Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, is similarly boosted by Trump’s influence ahead of their federal election.

A few months ago, it seemed a dead certainty that Pierre Poilievre would be Canada’s next Prime Minister. His Conservatives had a double-digit lead in the polls over the incumbent Liberals and Poilievre channelled the mounting frustrations of an electorate fatigued by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decade-long tenure. But by Tuesday morning, Poilievre’s hopes for national victory were dashed, and also, perhaps, his political future: not only had the Conservatives failed to win Monday’s national election, but their leader looked set to lose his own parliamentary seat.

There are a few reasons for the Liberals’ astonishing comeback. Trudeau bowed out early this year, triggering a leadership contest that helped change the image of his centre-left party to one less burdened by its years in power. In the figure of Trudeau’s successor, Mark Carney, a suave former governor of both the Bank of England and Canada, ordinary Canadians saw a competent and experienced leader. Poilievre, a career politician who had been waging an anti-Trudeau campaign for months, had less of an argument.

But no factor was more important than the shadow of President Donald Trump, who reset Canada’s political map with his aggressive trade war against the United States’ northern neighbour and repeated insistence that Canada would better off as America’s “51st state”. Carney’s Liberals capitalised on the nationalism stoked by Trump’s bullying, while Poilievre’s right-wing, would-be-populist brand was tarnished by its proximity to Trump. Canada’s other major factions – the New Democratic Party and Bloc Quebecois – haemorrhaged votes in an election that became a referendum on Trump, not Trudeau.

At an address hailing his party’s triumph on Tuesday morning (local time), Carney reiterated his belief that the old relationship with the US, built on free trade and deepening “integration”, was over. “As I’ve been warning for months,” he said, “America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. These are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so America can own us.”

The precedent set in Canada could soon be repeated in another Commonwealth country. Australia’s federal election is this weekend, and the incumbent centre-left Government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appears to have been boosted by Trump’s belligerence. Amid the escalating trade war provoked by the White House, including tariffs on steel and aluminium, the Australian public also seems to want leadership that can directly reckon with Trump’s challenge.

“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 campaign got under way.

Polling conducted by Australian public broadcaster ABC found that more than seven in 10 Australians thought Trump’s actions will leave them worse off financially, while a majority no longer viewed the US as a reliable security partner. Three months into Trump’s second term, 66% of Australians said their country could no longer count on the US and needed to further develop its own military capacity. That figure last June was under 40%.

The shift in attitudes has had a direct effect on the election. One-third of voters in Australia – where voting is mandatory – said they were less likely to vote for the conservative opposition leader Peter Dutton because of their views about Trump, according to a Resolve Political Monitor poll released two weeks ago.

Dutton, not unlike Poilievre, was ahead in the polls just before the start of Trump’s presidency. He embraced Trumpian rhetoric about “wokeness”, campaigned on a platform of immigration restrictionism, deregulation and slashing of the federal Government, and positioned himself as a change candidate at a time when ordinary citizens were chafing under rising costs and housing prices. But the prospects of his conservative coalition have slipped as the ruling Labor Party rebranded their rival as “Doge-y Dutton” – a gesture to Trump’s efforts to gut federal Government with the help of tech billionaire Elon Musk.

“Trump has emerged as the third candidate in this election campaign,” Mark Kenny, a professor specialising in politics at the Australian National University in Canberra, told Reuters. “He’s made it quite difficult for Peter Dutton to get his message across, and made it difficult for Dutton to be seen as an entirely independent figure in this election campaign.”

Albanese has tried to downplay the comparisons to the Trump effect in Canada. Australia doesn’t have the same trade deficit in goods with the US, nor the same entangled supply chains and dense thicket of neighbourly ties. “Some of that can be overestimated,” Albanese told the British-based Rest Is Politics podcast this month. “Canada obviously has a border with the US and it’s pretty brutal and up front, that division that is going on there.”

During the final debate before the May 3 election, Albanese said he and Trump share “different views, different values”, but he expressed confidence in the strength of the US-Australian security relationship, which he said has “universal” support among US lawmakers he has met.

Amanda Coletta, the Washington Post‘s Canada correspondent, noted that Carney had “pitched himself as a steady hand at a destabilising time”. Albanese appears to be doing the same in his bid to win re-election.

Andrew Carswell, a former press secretary to conservative former Prime Minister Scott Morrison – who was defeated by Albanese in 2022 – told Reuters that Trump had been “a wrecking ball” for his side’s chances. “Australian voters are looking on with concern at what is happening and saying if that is change, we don’t want it,” he said.