The Australian prime minister now has an ideological bedfellow in the UK. But he also has something in common with the loser: incumbency.
There’s a lot for Albanese to like. The two leaders are both from the progressive side of politics, with a similar project: to entrench the centre-left in office. Starmer hasLabour has notched up a rare victory for a centre-left party, in a Western world where much of the running is being made from a lot further to the right – in Italy, the Netherlands, France and the United States. So Albanese may feel encouraged and emboldened by Starmer’s achievement.
Looked at in purely British terms, Starmer won because Labour was not the Tories. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government was stale, tired, divided, regicidal and largely directionless, sapped by eight years of post-Brexit chaos.Voters deserted the Conservatives in droves, and headed in all directions. In a first-past-the-post system, even those voters who plumped for the populist Reform UK party or the centrist Liberal Democrats still benefited Starmer’s party.
People are still feeling the ache from the cost-of-living crisis: the rising energy costs, the double-digit inflation, the interest-rate increases. They feel like politicians haven’t done enough to tackle this, and are disconnected from a society that voters feel is going from bad to worse. This voter antipathy or disillusionment transcends party affiliation. Three days after the British election delivers a big Labour majority, France is likely to lurch a long way to the right.
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