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The Australian prime minister now has an ideological ally in Britain. But he also has one thing in common with the losers: they are both incumbents.
When British Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the new British Chancellor Keir Starmer to congratulate him on the Labour Party’s victory, his joy and excitement were genuine.
There is much to admire about Albanese. Both leaders come from the progressive wing of politics and have similar projects: to consolidate the centre-left in power. Starmer has made a point to engage with and learn from Albanese’s 2022 electoral victory and Labour’s subsequent style of governing.
In the Western world, right-wing parties have taken majorities in countries such as Italy, the Netherlands, France and the United States, with Labour securing a rare victory for a centre-left party. So Starmer’s achievement is likely to be emboldening and encouraging to Albanese.
But he shouldn’t get too complacent. The thing is, Starmer didn’t win because the British people were hungry for a social democratic government. He didn’t win because his Albanese-style strategy of small targets appealed to voters. He won simply because he wasn’t the government.
From a purely British perspective, Starmer won because Labour is not the Conservatives. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government is old, tired, divided, regicide and largely directionless, exhausted by eight years of post-Brexit chaos.
Voters are abandoning the Conservatives in droves. Even those who backed the populist Reform Britain Party or the centrist Liberal Democrats still favor Starmer’s party under a first-past-the-post system. Labour can only stay put while its rivals splinter.
This is a UK-specific situation. But it is also a global situation. The UK is not the only country where political parties can gain ground simply because they are in opposition.
Cost of living crisis
If you were to look for a common thread between elections in the UK, US, France, the EU and elsewhere in the Western world, it’s this: voters want to punish incumbents.
People are still feeling the pain of the cost-of-living crisis: rising energy costs, double-digit inflation, rising interest rates, and they feel politicians are not doing enough to address it and are out of touch with a society that voters see as getting worse.
Rightly or wrongly, they feel that their countries are plagued by poor public services, lax border controls, rising crime and costly environmental policies, and they conclude that their governments are failing to address the issues that matter most to their people.
If governments don’t immediately and meaningfully ease pressure on household budgets, dissatisfaction with all areas of public policy will start to creep in. They don’t want to be told that policy is complicated – they want to feel better, more certain.
Voter disgust or disappointment transcends party affiliation. Three days after the British general election results gave the Labour Party a clear majority, France is likely to swing sharply to the right.
People may find this confusing or contradictory, but the root cause is essentially the same: a desire to punish any government that comes to power during a cost-of-living crisis.
It is, therefore, a single phenomenon that could shake or sweep away a Democrat like Joe Biden in the United States, or a Liberal like Justin Trudeau in Canada, just as it has shaken or swept away the Conservatives in the United Kingdom and the Centre Party in France.
This could also work against Albanese. He may be hoping to draw support from Starmer’s success, but the real message may be more sobering. If he fails to understand voters’ core concerns, his real opponent in Britain may not be Starmer – it may be Sunak.
Source: Australian Financial Review
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