Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
A backlash against U.S.-style MAGA politics is being credited for powering the wins of Australia’s center-left Labor Party and Canada’s Liberals in recent national elections. Interestingly enough, this wasn’t the case in Britain, where Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK Party routed both the ruling Labour Party and the flailing opposition Conservatives in local polls.
So, why the apparent split in the Anglosphere? And can all three results be attributed, in different, ways to U.S. President Donald Trump?
The leaders of all three winning parties were quick to trumpet their triumphs as significant — even historic. For Canada’s Mark Carney, it was an endorsement of his argument that his country needs to carve out a much more independent path from its giant and covetous neighbor.
Meanwhile, Australia’s Anthony Albanese framed the resounding defeat of Peter Dutton — the hard-right prime ministerial candidate — as an assertion of the Australian way: “We do not seek our inspiration from overseas. We find it right here in our values and our people,” he said on election night.
And while Trump’s name may have not been on the ballot in either country, both Carney and Albanese were, in effect, running against the U.S. president — or using him as a foil. It was an approach that helped them pull off stunning turnarounds against opponents who embraced the U.S. leader, and buck an international trend that’s seen incumbent governments generally punished at the polls.
None of this seemed likely a few months ago, but Trump inadvertently shifted the dynamic to the detriment of conservatives who copied the MAGA playbook. He also supplied Carney and Albanese simple, easy narratives to offer their voters — something centrists have struggled mightily to do in this social media era of hyperbole and polarization.
As my POLITICO colleague Zoya Sheftalovich noted in her election dispatch from Sydney: “It was the U.S. president’s increasing unpopularity in Australia that really hurt Dutton’s image.” And the same was true for Canada’s Liberals — a few months ago, no one was giving them a chance of winning.
After a decade in power, the party looked shopworn, and amid a cost-of-living and affordable-housing crisis, public support was falling off a cliff. It was instead Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre who appeared to be the man of the moment, reveling in his moniker “Trump-lite.” His plan to axe a controversial carbon levy was making headway, as was his promise to return Canada to “common sense politics.” His party looked set for a comfortable win.
But Trump’s “51st state” musings and punishing trade sanctions turned this on its head, and Poilievre’s lead in the polls evaporated. Admittedly, some of this was down to a bump in support for the Liberals after an increasingly derided Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resigned, but being seen as a Canadian “Mini-Me” became a serious liability for Poilievre. And his belated scrambling to recast himself as a “tough guy” who would confront the “wise guy” south of the border lacked credibility.
Over in Britain, however, the Trump factor isn’t quite so clear. The U.S. president isn’t popular in the country, where one opinion poll ahead of the local elections found only 16 percent of respondents liked him.
But because the elections were local, the race was more focused on bread-and-butter issues, with immigration proving a key concern. And it’s important to note that despite his close association with Trump, Farage has been ready to butt heads with MAGA figures like U.S. Vice President JD Vance and senior Trump adviser Elon Musk, taking issue with the former for a perceived insult to the British armed forces and the latter over his support for the jailed far-right British activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon — also known as Tommy Robinson.
As this column argued before, Trump is a mixed blessing for right-wing populists beyond U.S. shores, as his tariff brinkmanship and bullying presents them with a sharp dilemma.
Before his second term, the continent’s right-wing populists and national conservatives made serious inroads in last summer’s European election — even if it wasn’t the huge surge they were boastfully predicting. And Trump was meant to give this populist wave added force, helping usher in a nationalist, MAGA-style global project, or so his international bedfellows fervently hoped.
However, this isn’t proving so straightforward. Criticize Trump or fail to sufficiently support him, and you risk his wrath or invite actions that will hurt your country. But fail to distance yourself, and you’re faced with the problem Poilievre and Dutton encountered.
Of course, that’s not so much the case in Eastern Europe, where solidarity with Trump isn’t as much of a liability, and there are veins of sympathy for Russia when it comes to the war in Ukraine.
Sławomir Mentzen, Poland’s far-right Confederation alliance candidate, is polling strongly ahead of next week’s presidential election. And similarly, after winning the first round of Romania’s presidential elections with 41 percent of the vote, it looks like the country’s next leader may well be George Simion — an unrepentant Trump ally who says he “totally agree[s] with MAGA ideology.”
And before centrists from the left or right sigh with relief over the victories in Canada and Australia, they should note one thing: Both Carney and Albanese had to tack right in several ways in order to secure their wins, and they struck strongly nationalistic notes.
In short, Trump has shifted the Overton Window. And if centrists are going to beat MAGA-style populists, they’ll have to adopt some of their thinking.
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