A New Trend in Global Elections: The Anti-Trump Bump

 

A New Trend in Global Elections: The Anti-Trump Bump

 

In voting in Canada and Australia, right-wing parties that borrowed from the MAGA playbook were punished. Elsewhere, President Trump is having a more complex impact.

 

Matina Stevis-Gridneff

By Matina Stevis-Gridneff

Reporting from Toronto

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/world/canada/global-elections-trump.html

May 4, 2025

 

The Trump factor is shaping global politics, one election at a time — just not necessarily to the president’s taste.

 

In major votes in Canada and Australia over the past two weeks, centrists saw their fortunes revived, while parties that had borrowed from the MAGA playbook lost out.

 

President Trump has been back in power for only three months, but already his policies, including imposing tariffs and upending alliances, have rippled into domestic political battles around the world.

 

While it is too soon to say that anti-Trump forces are on the rise globally, it is clear that voters have Mr. Trump somewhere on their mind as they make decisions.

 

Political cousins

Canada and Australia share a lot in common: a political system, a major mining industry, a sovereign in King Charles. Now they also share a remarkable political story.

 

In both countries, before Mr. Trump was inaugurated, the center-left ruling parties had been in poor shape and appeared poised to lose power. The front-runners in polls were the conservative parties, whose leaders flirted with Trumpian politics both in style and in substance.

Within weeks following Mr. Trump’s return to power, the Canadian and Australian political scenarios flipped in the same way: The center-left incumbents surged ahead of the conservative oppositions, and went on to win. And both countries’ conservative leaders lost not just the elections — they even lost their own seats in Parliament.

 

Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, campaigned on an explicitly anti-Trump message, putting the American president’s threats to Canada at the heart of his campaign. Australia’s leader, Anthony Albanese, did not. But both men got an anti-Trump bump.

 

Conservative leaders faced a scathing rejection at the ballot box. Pierre Poilievre, the head of the Canadian conservatives, and Peter Dutton, the leader of those in Australia, struggled to shake off a damaging association with Mr. Trump.

 

Mr. Dutton had walked back or moderated some Trumpian policy proposals when they proved to be unpopular, like radically slashing the public sector work force. Mr. Poilievre never really pivoted away from the Trump approach, even after the American president threatened Canada’s sovereignty.

 

Charles Edel, the Australia chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank, called the election in Australia a “blowout.” And he suggested that it had resulted, at least in part, from Mr. Trump’s implicit intrusion into the election, even if it had been mostly focused on domestic issues.

 

“There were enough similarities to the Canadian election to suggest that the conservatives’ fortunes fell as Trump’s tariffs and attacks on America’s allies ramped up,” he wrote in an email.

 

In Canada, some saw the Australian election result as a sign of solidarity from their cousins to the far south. “Albo Up!” an online meme said, swapping Mr. Albanese’s nickname into Mr. Carney’s hockey-inspired anti-Trump slogan: “Elbows Up!”

 

Flight to safety

Mr. Carney benefited from a perception among voters that he would be a stable hand to manage Mr. Trump and his unpredictable impact on Canada’s economy, which is deeply integrated with America’s and already hurting because of tariffs and uncertainty. His background as an economic policymaker also worked in his favor.

 

Across the world, in Singapore, the argument for stability in times of turmoil also appeared to help the incumbent People’s Action Party.

 

Last month, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said in Parliament that Singapore would sustain a bigger hit from the new American tariffs because of its reliance on global trade. He called on Singaporeans to brace for more shocks, and predicted slower growth.

 

Much like Mr. Carney, who declared the old relationship between Canada and the United States “over,” Mr. Wong issued a gloomy warning ahead of elections. “The global conditions that enabled Singapore’s success over the past decades may no longer hold,” he said.

 

On Saturday, voters returned his party to power, an outcome that was never in doubt but was still seen as bolstered by the “flight to safety” strategy that the party deployed.

 

“This is another case of the Trump effect,” said Cherian George, who has written books about Singaporean politics. “The sense of deep concern about Trump’s trade wars is driving a decisive number of voters to show strong support for the incumbent.”

 

Mixed impact

In Germany, an important Western ally that was the first to hold a national election after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the effect of the Trump factor has been less direct, but it has still been felt.

 

Friedrich Merz, who will be sworn in as Germany’s new chancellor on Tuesday, did not profit politically from Mr. Trump’s election the way leaders in Canada or Australia did in the more recent votes.

 

But if Mr. Trump’s confrontation with America’s European allies on defense and trade did not help Mr. Merz before the vote, it has helped him since.

 

Mr. Merz was able to push through a suspension of spending limits in fiscally austere Germany, which will make his job as chancellor easier. He did so by arguing that the old certainties about American commitment to mutual defense were gone.

 

“Do you seriously believe that an American government will agree to continue NATO as before?” he asked lawmakers in March.

 

The MAGA-sphere’s embrace of a far-right German party known as the AfD did not help it, according to polls, even though Elon Musk had gone as far as to endorse the party and to appear at one of its events by video stream.

 

A British exception

An unpredictable American president can have unpredictable consequences for leaders abroad, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain is fast discovering.

 

Mr. Starmer, a center-left leader who won his election before Mr. Trump won his, initially gained praise for the businesslike way with which he dealt with the new American president.

 

Unlike Mr. Carney, Mr. Starmer went out of his way to avoid direct criticism of Mr. Trump, finding common cause with him where possible and seeking to avert a rupture. After a visit to the White House that was deemed successful, even some of Mr. Starmer’s political opponents sounded impressed.

 

All the while, a Trump ally in Britain, Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-immigration party Reform U.K, was struggling to fend off accusations that he sympathizes with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

 

But Mr. Starmer soon ran out of steam after failing to parlay a pleasant White House visit into exemptions from American tariffs on British goods.

 

Last week, his Labour Party was dealt a significant blow when voting took place in regional and other elections in parts of England. It lost 187 council seats as well as a special parliamentary election in one of its strongholds.

 

By contrast, Mr. Farage’s party scored a spectacular success, not just winning that special election, but taking two mayoralties and making sweeping gains. For the first time, his party won control of the lowest tiers of government in several parts of the country.

 

Victoria Kim contributed reporting from Sydney; Sui-Lee Wee from Singapore; Christopher F. Schuetze from Berlin; and Stephen Castle from London.

 

Matina Stevis-Gridneff is the Canada bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the country.