What Effect Did Trump Have on Australia’s Election

Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, never styled himself as an anti-Trump figure in his pitch for re-election.

He said he trusted President Trump, and that he respected America’s democratic process. He rarely invoked Mr. Trump by name, redirecting questions about him to discussions of budget surpluses or a comment that he was focused on Australia. He was measured and opaque in any criticisms of Mr. Trump, and vowed not to retaliate against his tariffs.

But the global tumult set off by Mr. Trump’s return to power made him a factor in Australia’s election. And in the end, Mr. Albanese and his center-left Labor Party appear to have been bolstered by a wave of anti-Trump sentiment, pulling off a stunning landslide victory on Saturday.

The effects of his tariffs are likely to be less severe in Australia, whose biggest trading partner is China. So neither Mr. Albanese or the leader of the conservative opposition, Peter Dutton, were compelled to directly address the issue of Mr. Trump.

Even so, Mr. Trump’s presence was felt throughout the campaign, in which voters said their top priority, by far, was a nagging cost-of-living crisis.

Mr. Dutton, 54, of the Liberal Party, espoused some of the U.S. president’s ideas and rhetoric, earning him the nickname “Temu Trump” from political opponents, a reference to the bargain Chinese e-commerce site. Australians also watched with alarm as the balance of their mandated retirement accounts fluctuated wildly with the markets in reaction to Mr. Trump’s policy announcements.

“The Trump tariff decisions that were seen as mad by Australians, that really accelerated the process of people looking at Dutton, and at Trump, and going, ‘No,’” said Chris Wallace, a professor of political history at the University of Canberra. “It’s a victory for sensible, centrist politics.”

Only a few weeks ago, Mr. Albanese, 62, and his party were expected to struggle to hold onto a slim advantage in Parliament. Now they are on track to secure one of the largest majorities in recent memory, projected to win 86 of 150 seats in the lower house.

“I was surprised by the extent of the victory, how comprehensive it was, how emphatic it was,” said Niki Savva, a political columnist and author.

Mr. Dutton, she added, had run one of the worst campaigns she could recall. “He did not have a single good day during the campaign, his policies didn’t hang together,” Ms. Savva said.

Australians’ repudiation of Mr. Dutton and the campaign he waged was most apparent in his defeat in the parliamentary seat he had held for 24 years. (That was a parallel with Canada’s election, where the conservative leader also was ousted and incumbent re-elected.)

Mr. Dutton lost the seat in his home state of Queensland to Ali France, a former journalist, single mother and disability advocate who lost her leg in an accident. It was the third time Ms. France had challenged him as a Labor candidate in his home district of Dickson.

Mikeal Hooley, a Dickson voter, said he hadn’t been thrilled with Mr. Albanese’s performance in his three years in office, but Mr. Dutton’s echoing the U.S. president sealed his vote for Ms. France and the Labor Party.

“The Australian vibe is that we don’t want to go down that road,” Mr. Hooley, 35, said on Sunday. “We don’t want the kind of rhetoric and political landscape that exists in the United States.”

His father, Bill Hooley, had a different diagnosis. It wasn’t Mr. Trump but Mr. Dutton’s ineffective campaign — one that political commentators have described as “shambolic” and “shockingly bad” — that was to blame for his party’s resounding loss, he said.

“He had too many changes, too many back flips,” the older Mr. Hooley said.

Another voter who supported Labor in Mr. Dutton’s electorate, Ron Richardson, said he saw echoes of Mr. Trump in the way many of Mr. Dutton’s policies appeared erratic and poorly thought out, with little detail on what they would cost.

“I think he watched Trump too much,” said Mr. Richardson, 81, as he dropped off books at a free community library in a shopping complex a stone’s throw from the polling station where Mr. Dutton cast his vote a day earlier. “It bit him in the bum.”

One of the most damaging about-faces from Mr. Dutton was a vow to make government workers return to the office, which mirrored Trump administration policy but proved deeply unpopular in Australia. Many voters, especially mothers, worried that if Mr. Dutton came to power he would quickly expand the directive to the private sector. He ended up abandoning the proposal and apologizing.

That policy was the ultimate sign of how Mr. Dutton’s conservative coalition was out of touch with women, said Ms. Savva, who was on the staff of a former conservative prime minister, John Howard.

The conservatives’ disconnect with female voters has also bolstered independent candidates — nearly all of them women — who have come to be known as the “Teals.” Driven by environmental concerns and a desire for more transparent, centrist politics, they carved away at the Liberal Party’s base in the last federal election in 2022. Many secured a second term this year, solidifying the relatively new movement’s place in Australian politics.

Despite Labor’s overwhelming victory, there were clear signs the vote was not a blanket endorsement of Mr. Albanese’s first term.

Australia has a preferential voting system, in which voters rank all the hopefuls in order of preference. The candidates with the smallest number of votes are eliminated one by one, with their votes being redistributed to their next choice in line. On Saturday, Mr. Albanese’s Labor Party received only about a third of the primary or first-choice votes, meaning many of the votes that led them to victory came from ballots that had ranked minor parties or independents above Labor.

“That’s a signal from voters that they want Labor in office, but they want it to do much more than incremental moves on the edges,” said Ms. Wallace, the historian. “Labor does need to contemplate how to be more effective in government.”