A Tale of Two Elections: Trump Casts Shadow Over Australia and Singapore

It was the best of times or the worst of times in Australia and Singapore’s elections—depending on your approach to President Donald Trump. Victory was the reward for leaders and parties that portrayed themselves as ready to stand up to the White House and its effects on the global economy. Parties in both countries that calmed fears of U.S. instability won by a larger margin than expected.

On the flip side, those parties that appeared close to Trump or just unprepared to resist his aggressive second-term actions and any resulting global chaos hemorrhaged parliamentary seats and public support. In both Singapore and Australia, the losing parties often seemed aimless in defeat.

In Australia, the center-left Labor party was led to the polls by incumbent prime minister Anthony Albanese. Three or four months ago, Albanese, who had grown particularly unpopular, looked likely to lose to the conservative coalition and its candidate Peter Dutton. Labor was underwater because they had not effectively dealt with major domestic issues like slowing growth or the unsustainable cost of living in Australia’s major cities.

But the party gained a huge parliamentary majority in a landslide election on Saturday. Labor already has amassed at least eight-six seats, well over the seventy-six needed to control parliament. As later returns come in, it’s expected to add to its lead. Albanese will now be the first Australian prime minister to be elected to two terms in more than twenty years. Meanwhile, the conservative Liberal/National coalition is projected to get its lowest national vote share in history and will lose at least sixteen seats. Dutton even lost his election in his home district, resembling the conservative leader in the recent Canadian elections who was voted out of his seat.

Like Canada’s Liberals, Australia’s Labor party received an enormous poll boost from the public’s animus towards Trump. His administration placed tariffs on Australia even though the United States has a trade surplus with the country, and his trade representative has even publicly mocked Australia.

Albanese underscored his experience as a lawmaker and cast himself as a defender of progressive ideas during the election. This appears to have convinced voters that he is best equipped to handle foreign affairs and defend the country against Trump’s policies. His success could have a ripple effect domestically. Albanese may now be able to deliver on major promises related to the cost of living and housing, student debt, and the expansion of national health care.

In contrast, Dutton—the conservative candidate—seemed to many Australian voters as incapable of handling Trump. In fact, he appeared to commit to Trumpian-style policies on the campaign trail that are highly unpopular in Australia. These included radical DOGE-style cuts to the national government, draconian measures regarding immigration, and possibly destroying the highly respected national broadcaster that Dutton said he “hates.”

Dutton’s past friendliness with Trump did not help matters. It may now take the Liberal-National conservative coalition multiple elections to recover, despite consistently dominating elections for the two decades prior to Albanese’s success.

Singapore also appeared to experience a Trumpian backlash in its Saturday election. Voters overwhelmingly cast their ballots for the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP). This helped solidify the position of Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, who was running a campaign as party leader for the first time. The PAP—which has run Singapore for almost all of its six-decades of independence—lost seats to a revived opposition and saw its popular vote share decline in recent elections, but it reversed those trends this time around. The PAP received a five percent boost in the popular vote in the election.

Before the vote, many analysts, including myself, thought the opposition Workers Party appeared poised to win a larger share of voters and seats than in the last election, as it blasted the PAP on issues like the cost of living, low growth, and unavailable housing—issues that seemingly resonated with working-class and younger voters. Yet the Workers Party won the same number of seats in parliament—ten—as in the last election and suffered losses in the popular vote.

Why did the PAP bounce back? To be sure, as I and other analysts have noted many times, the ruling party benefits from drawing districts that favor it and by silencing critics through the legal system—the Workers Party leader was found guilty this year of a very minor offense.

But the PAP reversed the trend for other important reasons. For one, the electorate clearly moved toward the ruling party because—as in Australia—it thought the incumbent was best positioned to handle the turmoil and uncertainty caused by Trump’s policies.

“Singapore feels particularly vulnerable given its economy's size and exposure to international forces… Also we are notoriously risk-averse voters,” Ian Chong, an associate professor in political science at the National University of Singapore, told the BBC after the election.

The PAP has also, to some extent, taken seriously the need for a larger social welfare system, which it had opposed for decades. For instance, the ruling party established childcare and daycare support. It also emphasized that it understood complaints about housing and has sped up the affordable housing building process. These growing types of social welfare probably helped blunt the Workers Party’s push for enhancing the public safety net and its argument for an unemployment benefit.

The opposition also struggled because it did not organize as in the past. By not wholly coalesce behind the leading party, the Workers Party, the opposition suffered from in-fighting and possibly lost seats.

Overall, what can be learned from these elections and those in Canada and Greenland? For one, Trump’s international toxicity is creating serious election challenges for conservative parties around the world. It also appears to have created a trend in which voters are now favoring incumbents after years of tossing them out in Europe and other countries. This is perhaps because the incumbent is seen as more experienced in dealing with the United States and with global economic volatility.

It remains to be seen whether those trends continue. Upcoming elections in South Korea and Poland—which have their own unique domestic issues—will pose fresh tests that could indicate whether conservative parties abroad are able to reverse their fortunes.

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy