Dutton needs to emulate a former president named Donald. No, not that one

The midpoint of what’s been dubbed the year of democracy feels like an apposite moment to pause and take stock. What trends are emerging amid the tumble of overseas elections? How might they influence politics in Australia, as Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton delineate the battlespace for the next federal election?

The most obvious storyline to emerge is also the most ominous: the rise of far and hard-right parties, and the populist appeal of anti-immigration and anti-green policies. At last weekend’s European elections, EU politics took a rightward turn.

Illustration: John Shakespeare. Credit:

In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won double the vote of Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance Party. In Germany, the ultra-nationalist Alternative for Germany party (AfD) received a larger share of the vote than Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left Social Democrats – despite being hit by the withdrawal of its lead candidates who had stated that members of Hitler’s SS were “not all criminals”. Far-right parties, in the EU’s two most important bellwether democracies, are on the march. So spooked was Macron that he called snap parliamentary elections in the belated hope of heading off Le Pen at the pass.

In the UK election, the mighty Conservative Party, one of the world’s most well-oiled election-winning machines, looks like being decimated. Even before Rishi Sunak’s catastrophic decision to leave the beaches of Normandy ahead of a D-Day commemoration involving other international leaders, the Tories faced a shellacking. At the 2019 election, the party won 365 seats. Now it might struggle to retain 100. A “near-extinction event” is predicted, its worst election result in 100 years.

With the hapless Sunak lurching from one unforced crisis to the next, Nigel Farage has become the dominant figure on the British right. In some polls, his Reform UK party is neck and neck with the Conservatives. Sunak’s D-Day absenteeism was manna from heaven for Farage. His accusation that Britain’s first prime minister of colour “doesn’t understand our culture” was not so much a dog whistle as a clanging town cry delivered with the most ear-splitting of handbells. Yet that did not stop Tory grandees openly talking of welcoming him into the Conservative fold, in the hope he could help shepherd the party back from its post-election wilderness.

In America, Trumpism has obliterated traditional conservatism, and turned the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan into something more akin to a cult-like personal movement. Donald Trump, though, also appeals to more rationally-minded voters, partly because of his tough approach to immigration and border protection.

Peter Dutton’s rightward shift, on immigration and climate change, therefore seems part of a global trend. The centrepiece of his budget reply was a pledge to slash permanent migration by 25 per cent, which is always a populist vote winner. Now he is trumpeting his intention to ditch the legally binding target to cut greenhouse emissions by 43 per cent by 2030. In a flare-up of the climate wars, Anthony Albanese accused him of walking away from the Paris climate agreement, which is what Trump did in 2017.

At first glance, making the Liberal Party more illiberal aligns with the zeitgeist of the global right. But if you delve deeper into recent election results, an alternative conservative narrative emerges.

In the European elections, hard-right and far-right parties did not perform as well as predicted. They underperformed in Greece, Sweden, Finland and Slovakia. In Germany, the big victor was not the AfD but the centre-right Christian Democratic Union. Poland saw victory for the centrist Civic Coalition, led by the erstwhile president of the European Council, Prime Minister Donald Tusk. If Australian conservatives are looking for a former president named Donald to emulate, then Tusk rather than Trump is arguably their man.

The humbling of Narendra Modi in the Indian elections is also a brake on extremism. Expected to pull off a landslide victory, this nationalistic populist failed to gain a simple parliamentary majority. Many Indian voters thought his Hindu nationalism, which has heightened communal tensions especially with the country’s Muslim minority, needed to be curbed.

Even in America, Trump is not the whole story on the conservative side of politics. True, he won the Republican primary race without breaking a sweat, but his most durable rival, the comparatively moderate Nikki Haley, won 22 per cent of the vote on Super Tuesday, a significant slice of voters. Many traditional Republicans remain staunch Never Trumpers. Even though they could not prevent him from winning the party’s presidential nomination, their withdrawal of support could prevent him from winning the presidency.

Then there are the conservative waverers concerned by the former president’s criminality. After Trump’s conviction in New York, polls suggested that one in 10 Republicans would now be less likely to vote for him.

If, as teal MPs have accused, Peter Dutton is adopting a Trump-like playbook, then he would be wise to consider what happened to his predecessor, Scott Morrison. Australians were alarmed at the Trump-style norm-busting of Morrison’s multi-ministerial pandemic power grab. Morrison’s Pentecostalism, while winning admirers in the US Bible belt, was off-putting here. The jibe always was that Scotty came from marketing, but the fact that Scotty also attended a mega-church compounded his image problem. It was not a rejection of his religiosity per se but rather an Australian aversion to US-style faith-based politics.

In New York last month, as he stood alongside Donald Trump in front of the golden doors of the former president’s Fifth Avenue penthouse, Morrison looked like a Trumpian disciple. Echoing the now-convicted felon’s talking points, a “pile-on” is how he later described the multiple criminal prosecutions mounted against Trump.

Unquestionably, there will be Australians who concur that Trump is the victim of a Democratic legal witch-hunt, but the conspiratorial undertones of Morrison’s remarks felt like they belonged more in the world of Marjorie Taylor Greene than the party of Sir Robert Gordon Menzies. Morrison’s fall from grace in Australia highlights the perils of Americanisation.

When pondering how tailwinds from overseas should influence the direction of Australian travel, it is always worth remembering that the only two prime ministers since the early 1980s to win consecutive federal elections pursued an emphatically Australian brand of politics. Bob Hawke’s dinkum Australianness was the key to his personal success. So, too, his homegrown brand of centrist Third Way politics, forged with Paul Keating, which was mimicked overseas.

Likewise, John Howard’s success came from his close reading of the Australian electorate rather than fads imported from abroad. Though often portrayed as a Thatcher-style ideologue, it was his pragmatism that helped Howard win four federal elections. His demise in 2007, moreover, partly stemmed from getting too close to a right-wing US president, George W. Bush, on the question of ditching the Kyoto Protocol and of sending Aussie diggers to Iraq.

Emboldened by the Coalition’s Senate victory at the 2004 federal election, Howard also made the mistake of becoming too doctrinaire in his pursuit of labour reform through WorkChoices. When he aped the ideological bloody-mindedness of Margaret Thatcher, he ran into trouble.

To succeed in Australian politics, politicians need also to understand the distinctiveness of Australian democracy. This country’s great safeguards against polarisation and extremism, compulsory voting and preferential voting, mitigate against a politics conducted at the fringes. Elections are a contest for the Australian mainstream.

Turning right will also exacerbate Dutton’s Sydney Harbour problem. It is hard to foresee a speedy Liberal return to power without winning back the foreshore and coastline Sydney seats now held by teals and independents.

What should Anthony Albanese glean from the year of democracy? First, there is clearly a mood of rebellious anti-incumbency, heightened by cost-of-living pressures. The elections have also underscored the decline of major parties. In South Africa, the African National Congress saw its vote dip below 50 per cent for the first time in a nationwide election. In Germany, the ruling Social Democrats suffered their worst result in a nationwide poll in more than a century. The BJP in India and the ANC in South Africa have been forced into coalition governments, which for Albanese may be a worrying portent.

Maybe the main takeaway for both the major parties is the same. Keep Australian politics Australian. For Peter Dutton, what is happening in America, France and Germany in 2024 is less instructive than what happened in Wentworth, Kooyong and Goldstein in 2022.

Nick Bryant, a former BBC correspondent, is the author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict With Itself.

Peter Hartcher is on leave.