The Australian prime minister now has an ideological bedfellow in the UK. But he also has something in common with the loser: incumbency.
When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese phones his new British counterpart Keir Starmer to congratulate him on Labour’s victory, his pleasure and excitement will be genuine.
There’s a lot for Albanese to like. The two leaders are both from the progressive side of politics, with a similar project: to entrench the centre-left in office. Starmer has made a point of talking to, and learning from, Albanese’s 2022 election win, and the ALP’s subsequent governing style.
Labour has notched up a rare victory for a centre-left party, in a Western world where much of the running is being made from a lot further to the right – in Italy, the Netherlands, France and the United States. So Albanese may feel encouraged and emboldened by Starmer’s achievement.
But he shouldn’t be too encouraged. The thing is, Starmer did not win because Britain was hankering for a social-democratic government. He did not win because his Albanese-style small-target strategy appealed to voters. He won merely because he wasn’t the government.
Looked at in purely British terms, Starmer won because Labour was not the Tories. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government was stale, tired, divided, regicidal and largely directionless, sapped by eight years of post-Brexit chaos.
Voters deserted the Conservatives in droves, and headed in all directions. In a first-past-the-post system, even those voters who plumped for the populist Reform UK party or the centrist Liberal Democrats still benefited Starmer’s party. Labour just had to stand still while its opponents fractured.
That’s the Britain-specific picture. But there is a global dimension. Britain is not the only country where a political party is making inroads simply because it is in opposition.
Cost-of-living crisis
If you’re looking for the common thread that unites elections in Britain, the US, France, the EU, and everywhere else in the Western world, it’s this: voters want to punish incumbents.
People are still feeling the ache from the cost-of-living crisis: the rising energy costs, the double-digit inflation, the interest-rate increases. They feel like politicians haven’t done enough to tackle this, and are disconnected from a society that voters feel is going from bad to worse.
They sense, rightly or wrongly, that their countries are beset by poor public services, porous borders, rising crime and expensive green policies. And they conclude that governments are failing to tackle people’s primary concerns.
If their government isn’t tangibly and immediately easing the squeeze on the household budget, resentment starts to build around every area of public policy. They don’t want to be told that it’s complicated – they want to feel better, and more certain.
This voter antipathy or disillusionment transcends party affiliation. Three days after the British election delivers a big Labour majority, France is likely to lurch a long way to the right.
People may find this confusing or contradictory, but the wellspring is essentially the same: a desire to punish any government that has been in charge during the cost-of-living crisis.
So it’s a single phenomenon, and it could rattle or sweep aside a Democrat like Joe Biden in the United States, or a liberal like Justin Trudeau in Canada, just as it has a Conservative in Britain and a centrist in France.
And it could count against Albanese, too. He may be looking to take succour from Starmer’s success, but the real message could be much more sobering. If he can’t connect to the very core of voters’ concerns, his real counterpart in Britain might not be Starmer – it could be Sunak.
Source: The Australian Financial Review
