What to expect around the world in 2025

Readers would be hard-pressed to find a nation around the world that will not be touched by policies or the disruptive influence of Donald Trump in 2025.

As our correspondents note below, many of the major issues they will be watching in their patches will be touched – directly or indirectly – by the actions of the man returning to the Oval Office on January 20. Will he put out fires or start new ones? Strap yourself in.

Seemingly everywhere: US President-elect Donald Trump is expected to influence much more than the United States in 2025.Credit: Bloomberg

Europe

The trajectory of European politics in 2024 frequently generated the appearance of progress without achieving much concrete change. Whether elections resulted in parliamentary deadlock, as in France, or a big majority for a single party, as in the UK, they rarely led to swift strategic successes.

How the European Union and the UK overcome such political paralysis to meet pressing internal challenges and guard against external threats – from Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping or US President-elect Donald Trump – will be the dominant theme of European politics in 2025. It could result in stronger anti-democratic forces in Europe.

Trump could withdraw the US from NATO – or at least weaken the American pillar of the alliance – making security commitments conditional on a sharp increase in European defence spending. He’s also signalled a cut to support for Ukraine and tariffs on European exports that could strain economic ties.

European leaders have already offered welcoming gestures to the president-elect, including NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s trip to Mar-a-Lago and French President Emmanuel Macron’s trilateral meeting with Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Paris.

Behind the scenes, however, European leaders are preparing for a far different response based on which of Trump’s previous statements – and outright threats – will become policy.

French President Emmanuel Macron (left) and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Brussels on December 18.Credit: AP

France is in a political quagmire and appears unlikely to get out of it soon. The lack of a solid parliamentary majority for Macron is making it hard for the government to tackle big issues, especially the growing budget deficit – which is topping 6 per cent of GDP. Political gridlock in the legislative branches of government may lead to more elections in the summer of 2025, adding to the uncertainty.

Germany is gearing up for elections in February after Chancellor Olaf Sholz suffered a no-confidence vote, which could bring more political instability as businesses and families grapple with fears of economic stagnation and geopolitical tensions. There’s potential that the hard-right Alternative for Germany will cause mass electoral disruption and bring more economic policy shifts. And there are concerns as to whether the country can maintain its competitive edge amid structural changes and increased defence spending.

The rise of Russian interference is also playing a part. The European Commission has opened a formal investigation into how Chinese-owned TikTok manages the risk of election meddling in response to the crisis created in Romania in 2024. Many are pointing the finger at Russia.

In Georgia, countrywide protests, including sporadic confrontations with police, have been going on since the general elections in October. The opposition alleges that the ruling party tampered with the results. Daily protests are attracting tens of thousands of people, with violent dispersal by police. There seem to be few prospects for the crisis to end in compromise.

In the United Kingdom, politics is potentially more stable than it has been in years, despite early wobbles from Keir Starmer and his new Labour government. Immigration and the economy will be the two things to watch, but again, Trump could turn everything on its head.

Eyes will be on the health of King Charles and Catherine, Princess of Wales.Credit:

The health of King Charles, who is still undergoing treatment for an undisclosed cancer, is also likely to again attract headlines, as will the health of his daughter-in-law Catherine, Princess of Wales.– Rob Harris, Europe correspondent

North America

After Donald Trump’s extraordinary political comeback, all eyes now turn to how he will govern when he is sworn into office on January 20. The Republican’s second presidency will have a huge impact on everything from immigration and trade to economics and foreign policy, and not just in the US.

While many of his sweeping proposals are big on rhetoric, they lack detail and come with inflationary risks.

For instance, Trump’s signature election promise was to embark on the biggest deportation program of illegal immigrants in US history. But he is yet to explain exactly how he will remove the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in America – most of whom are workers fuelling the US economy in sectors such as agriculture, construction and hospitality – or how he will fund the controversial plan, which some experts say could cost up to $US88 billion ($141 billion) annually.

While Trump’s touted tariffs on Chinese imports could encourage domestic production and create jobs in certain industries, they could also lead to retaliatory tariffs, higher costs for consumers and a broader trade war with global implications.

Traditional Russian wooden dolls called Matryoshka depicting China’s President Xi Jinping, US President-elect Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin for sale at a souvenir shop in St Petersburg last month.Credit: AP

There will also be geopolitical challenges for the US as the war in Gaza spills over into the new year, and as Russia’s war with Ukraine enters its third bloody winter.

Trump – who is an ardent supporter of Israel and has long admired Russian President Vladimir Putin – has signalled an eagerness to wrap up the conflicts as quickly as possible. But at what cost to Ukrainians and Palestinians?

US relations with China will also be of interest, particularly for Australia as it pushes ahead with the AUKUS submarine deal inked by President Joe Biden, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and then British PM Rishi Sunak.

Australia will purchase Virginia-class submarines from the US under the AUKUS defence pact.Credit: AP

On the one hand, Trump has nominated several China hawks to serve in key foreign policy posts, such as Senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state and Congressman Mike Walz as national security adviser.

On the other, he has often boasted of a “very strong relationship” with Chinese President Xi Jinping and invited him to attend next month’s presidential inauguration.

To that end, the dynamics between the two superpowers remain unpredictable, and it is unclear whether the US would stand up to Beijing in a conflict over Taiwan or in the South China Sea.

Back in Washington, it will be interesting to see what role Elon Musk will continue to play in the president’s orbit. 2025 will also be a year of rebuilding for demoralised Democrats following Vice President Kamala Harris’ crushing defeat. After losing the White House, the US Congress, and all seven battleground states, the party now has a leadership vacuum and a policy void it needs to fill as it heads towards the midterm elections in 2026. It will be the Democrats’ first chance to win back control of the Senate or the House of Representatives, and dent Trump’s legislative agenda ahead of the next presidential election in 2028.

In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is under mounting pressure from his party MPs to leave after nine years in power. Some have warned that if he stays, they face the prospect of a crushing defeat in this year’s election. While in Mexico, new President Claudia Sheinbaum will have her hands full just dealing with Trump on immigration and tariffs. – Farrah Tomazin, North America correspondent

North Asia

From January, China’s President Xi Jinping will confront the greatest challenge to the China-US relationship on his watch to date, as Donald Trump returns to the White House with a hawkish foreign policy team and a promise to slap 60 per cent tariffs on all Chinese imports.

For Xi, Trump 2.0 is an unpredictable mix of admirer, frenemy and foe whose return has revived speculation about whether a leader-to-leader grand bargain on economic policy or even the status of Taiwan could be on the cards, or whether the superpower relationship will plummet to an even more precarious state.

A renewed trade war with the US will further beleaguer China’s troubled economy and will likely ramp up pressure on Beijing to haemorrhage the country’s deflationary spiral by embracing large-scale stimulus to stabilise the property market and boost domestic consumption beyond the string of measures announced in 2024.

A member of the Taiwan Coast Guard monitors a China Coast Guard boat as it passes near the coast of Matsu Islands, Taiwan, in October.Credit: AP

At the same time, China will look for signs of a Trump-led US retreat from conflicts, regional alliances and international bodies to strengthen its own status as a superpower and peel away support for a US-led global order.

Trump 2.0 is also a wildcard for the future of self-governing Taiwan, which relies on the US as its security guarantor to act as a deterrence against China’s increasingly aggressive unification ambitions. Xi’s timeline for the People’s Liberation Army to be capable of executing an invasion of the island by 2027 falls within Trump’s second term.

Taiwan’s leadership under President William Lai will be seeking to leverage its relationships with Republicans in Washington to lock in the new administration’s support, given Trump’s repeated ambivalence about America defending Taiwan and complaints that it had “stolen” America’s chip business.

South Korea will enter the new year in a lingering state of political turmoil after President Yoon Suk Yeol was impeached by the national parliament in December following a short-lived attempt to impose martial law. Acting president Han Duck-soo was also impeached.

The country’s Constitutional Court is now in charge of deciding whether to uphold the impeachment charges in a hearing process that could take as long as six months. If upheld, South Koreans will vote in a snap presidential election in 2025, to be held within 60 days of the court’s decision.

In Japan, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba faces the ongoing challenge of navigating minority government after his gamble snap election in 2024 resulted in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party being savaged by voters. After decades of political dominance, the LDP must now negotiate with minor parties on every piece of legislation, risking political deadlock, weakening Ishiba’s mandate, and adding to the political uncertainty in the region at a time when Australia and the US are boosting ties with Japan to counter China’s influence.

The deepening military alliance between North Korea and Russia will be closely watched in 2025, in light of Kim Jong-un’s decision to send troops and weapons supplies to aid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Many Western analysts regard North Korea’s unprecedented military intervention as a leverage play that will give the country access to Russian weapons technology and economic assistance after years of crippling Western sanctions, and intensify the threat it poses to the South Korea-US alliance on the Korean peninsula. – Lisa Visentin, North Asia correspondent

South-East Asia

Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto seems keen to show the world he is no mere extension of Joko Widodo. His first couple of months in the job have been spent meeting foreign leaders and sending foreign drug criminals home, neither of which particularly interested his predecessor.

Indonesia’s newly inaugurated President Prabowo Subianto (left) greets Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence, Richard Marles, in Jakarta in October.Credit: AP

The strongman ex-general, forever dogged by questions about his human rights record, also intends to pardon about a third of Indonesia’s prison population to ease overcrowding. Papuan freedom fighters will be on the list, perhaps signalling he wishes to engage more constructively on matters of self-determination.

By weight of its size and economic heft, Indonesia is South-East Asia’s de facto leader. How Prabowo’s world-trotting and outward gaze shapes the region will be worth watching.

The most desperate situation remains Myanmar, which has been in the grip of a multi-fronted and escalating civil war since general Min Aung Hlaing’s military removed the democratically elected government in February 2021. Will this be the year the despised military junta backs down or crumbles? Amid serious battleground losses and a collapsing economy, the regime has promised elections in 2025. Even if it happens, the process seems doomed from the start as members of the former popular government are in exile or, like leader Aung San Suu Kyi, rotting in hellish jails.

Myanmar’s Junta has promised elections in 2025, but it may be too late for a comeback by jailed 79-year-old former leader Aung San Suu Kyi.Credit: AP

As the chair of ASEAN in 2025, Malaysia will be particularly important if progress is to be made on the confounding question of Myanmar. The bloc has been completely ineffective in this regard so far, but Malaysia has at least suggested it will try to bring the warring parties to the table for mediation.

The South China Sea will again be a challenging matter for ASEAN, which is moving extremely slowly, as it likes to do, on a code of conduct with China.

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim is fond of China and, incensed at what is happening in Gaza, has been shifting his sentiments away from the West. How far he turns the dial on this will be relevant to Australia because Malaysia is a strong security partner, and even permanently hosts Australian Defence personnel at its Royal Malaysia Air Force base Butterworth.

No nation is at the South China Sea coalface quite like the Philippines. Expect more clashes with China in 2025. The Philippines is an American ally, and Trump’s cabinet appointments are China hawks. But how the Donald will reckon with this escalating conflict is anyone’s guess.

Something else to watch in the Philippines is the midterm elections. Expect more fireworks from the powerful Duterte family.

Another nation eyeballing Trump’s statements closely is Vietnam. It has a massive trade surplus with the US, which Trump views as a losing deal. The country has a rapidly growing economy and could be in the gun for some trade and tariff blowback.

In April, Vietnam and the world will mark the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) to the North Vietnamese forces, a rather significant moment for both East and West.

In a big month for anniversaries, April will also mark 50 years since the Khmer Rouge marched into the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh and began the slaughter of perhaps 2 million people. Its modern rulers, Hun Sen and his prime minister son, Hun Manet, like to couch their repression of the people in terms of preserving hard-won stability. They will probably seek to use the anniversary for their own propagandist ends.

At Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, photos document some of the Khmer Rouge victims held there. This year will mark the 50th anniversary of the start of the tragedy.Credit: Corbis via Getty Images

Singapore, a great friend of Australia, must hold elections before November. Don’t expect surprises. The People’s Action Party (PAP) has been in power since the first iteration of self-government in 1959 by way of authoritarianism and economy building. Lawrence Wong, who was handed the prime ministership by Lee Hsien Loong in May, will almost certainly keep his job. Even the opposition leader, Pritam Singh of the Workers’ Party, felt it necessary to call out a newspaper for writing that the party “will tilt towards the strategy” of trying to win the election.

“This is false,” he wrote on Facebook. “The medium-term goal is to play our part in ensuring at least 1/3 of Parliament is not in the PAP’s hands.” – Zach Hope, South-East Asian correspondent

Middle East

The Middle East is likely to continue to dominate the headlines in 2025. After the surprising demolition of the Assad regime in Syria last month, the world will be watching what the rebels-turned-rulers will do in the country, including whether they can overcome perceptions of Islamic extremism to allow freedom to Syrians of all faiths, and be taken seriously on the global stage. Turkey, which is in battle with Kurdish forces in Syria, will be watching closely.

Iran’s influence in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and the Occupied Palestinian Territories will continue to be seen as a threat to stability in the region, especially by arch-enemy Israel, whose emboldened prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is bent on teaching the entire region a “lesson” after flattening the Gaza Strip, large parts of Lebanon and the West Bank.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.Credit: Graphic by Marija Ercegovac/AP photo

Despite constant talk of a pact with Gaza-rulers Hamas to end the war in Gaza, Palestinians continue to die in unprecedented levels, while the West vacillates on the merits of Netanyahu’s actions. Here, too, people will be watching what Trump can actually do to bring peace, beyond promising deals and admiring the lands with a real estate developer’s eyes. – Lia Timson, deputy world editor

Latin America

Again, a second Trump presidency is likely to have a sizeable impact on countries in the rest of the Americas. The US president-elect has already signalled a major fight with Mexico and other nations over the influx of migrants from Venezuela, Guatemala and elsewhere, a tussle over the rights (and fees) of the Panama Canal, and support for disruptors such as Argentina’s President Javier Milei. Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Senator Marco Rubio, himself a Latino who has travelled to Central and South America numerous times, is expected by analysts of the Atlantic Council to seek deeper relationships in the region. Meanwhile, in Brazil, leftist president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva has declared 2025 the year Brazilians will harvest the fruits of his tax reform, fiscal policy and trade reorientation towards the BRICS, Mercosur (a trade bloc comprising Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela) and the European Union. – Lia Timson

Oceania

In New Zealand, the question of the possible reinterpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi and Maori rights will come to a head when its Conservative government pushes on with moves to reduce what it considers special treatment of Indigenous New Zealanders. Meanwhile, the government will also try to climb out of recession, while hoping to meet its targets to reduce violent crime, reduce youth offending, increase school attendance and remain on track to meet its 2050 net zero climate change targets.

The turquoise lagoon at Tadine Bay, south-west coast of Maré Island, part of the Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia.Credit: iStock

France is still to resolve the instability unleashed last year by changes to the electoral roll in New Caledonia, after riots and the jailing in Paris of some of the protest leaders cemented a stand-off between the French Pacific territory and its political masters at the Elysee Palace. The jury is out on whether the popular holiday destination can reclaim its place on tourists’ must-visit list this year.

In the wider Pacific, soft diplomacy is expected to continue to play a part in keeping China, the US and Australia busy fighting for the loyalty of nations such as Fiji, Nauru, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu.

Africa

Despite – or perhaps because of – the outcome of the US election, consulting firm Africa Practice expects governments on the continent “to exercise even greater influence in 2025, including at the BRICS and the G20 under the South African presidency”. The firm expects African countries to “diversify their international alliances in order to minimise the fallout” of Trump 2.0 – including in mining and agricultural export deals with a wider number of partners, from the Middle East to Russia to the Southern Hemisphere. Via BRICS, which has now welcomed many more countries than the original Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, countries like Uganda, Ethiopia and Nigeria may get a chance to expand their horizons.

With agencies

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