Global Trump Backlash To Be Tested As Canada And Australia Vote

Donald Trump’s Nov. 5 victory capped a bad year for incumbents as authoritarian populists gained ground across the globe in an unprecedented year of elections. Less than six months later, the tide seems to be turning.

Center-left governments in Canada and Australia that appeared destined to lose office at the start of 2025 are seeing their electoral fortunes revived as Trump’s America First policies spur a backlash across western democracies.

In Europe, the ability to stand up for Ukraine and manage Trump in the process has earned plaudits and a bump in polls for both UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron. The duo have worked to salvage support for Ukraine after a late February Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy devolved into a fiery exchange.

And Mexico’s first female president Claudia Sheinbaum, already enjoying high popularity following her landslide victory last year, saw her approval rating soar to a 30-year high as her ability to negotiate on trade with Trump was applauded by voters and foreign leaders alike.

As incumbents get a poll bounce by standing up to Trump’s salvos, right-leaning candidates are losing ground through association with the US president or his policies. The effect may be less pronounced in the UK, where Starmer’s personal approval ratings are up but his Labour Party is down, and the right-wing Reform UK is surging. Still, the inflation and cost-of-living pressures that led voters to unseat dozens of governments globally now seem less urgent next to Trump’s trade and other threats.

“The Trump effect has trumped the affordability issues and debate because people are even more frightened of him than they are of the lack of affordability,” said Ian Lee, associate professor at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business in Ottawa.

The reversal in fortunes is perhaps starkest in Canada, where for much of the last two years then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party’s popularity were in a rapid descent after fumbling immigration and housing policies. Their rivals Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives — who promised to fix “broken” Canada after nearly a decade under Trudeau — were surging in polls and on track to win a parliamentary majority.

At the start of the year, their fortunes flipped. Trudeau quit and his party chose former central banker Mark Carney to replace him. By March, the Conservatives lost their poll dominance and now the Liberals look set to win a fourth term in the April 28 federal election.

While Trudeau’s resignation initially drove the Liberal resurgence, Trump has played an outsize role. Opinion polls show Trump consistently tops the list of most important issues to voters as his tariffs and threats to annex Canada crowd out pre-Trump problems including worsening housing shortages, unsustainable levels of immigration and a declining standard of living.

“The question is, will that concern about our survival as a country trump on Election Day the bread-and-butter issues of affordability,” said Lee. “It just comes down to which suites of values are going to prevail. Will it be affordability, which is more micro and individual, or the more aggregate concern about the future of the country?”

For many Liberal voters, dealing with Trump and navigating what Carney has called “the biggest crisis of our lifetimes” is most pressing. They see the former governor of both Canadian and UK central banks as most qualified.

“Before we cut taxes or do anything, we just have to sort tariffs out first. It may be a short-term problem. But it would cripple us in the long term,” said Tobias Binder, a business owner in Toronto who said he’s no longer under “Poilievre’s spell” and now plans to vote Liberal.

Committed Conservative voters, on the other hand, view Trump as a distraction to many of Canada’s chronic problems. “This is an extremely important election. Just ask one very simple question: What has improved in your life over the last eight years? Then decide who you want to vote for,” said Sonduren Fanarredha, an automotive content creator.

That same question resonates in Australia, which goes to the polls on May 3.

After news of Trump’s victory broke in Canberra, some members of the center-right Liberal-National Coalition held parties in their parliamentary offices, seeing the American election result as part of a global shift that would help them topple Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s center-left Labor government. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton drew comparisons between the US election and the imminent one in Australia, highlighting issues such as immigration and anti-woke policies.

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“Australians deserve a migration program that acts in our country’s best interest, not against our best interests, and again, I think that was a big issue in the US and it’ll be a big issue in our election as well,” Dutton told radio station 2GB shortly after the US election. In February, he called Trump “shrewd” and a “big thinker.”

Dutton’s Coalition led the Labor government in the polls through the final months of 2024, and some lawmakers were increasingly optimistic about their chances of making Albanese the first prime minister in a century to lose power after just one term.

Crafted over his two decades in Parliament, Dutton’s own image was that of a strong leader, with Trump-like policies such as heavy cuts to immigration, shrinking the size of government and winding back progressive social reforms. While far more of an establishment figure than Trump, Dutton had framed the election as a contest between a “weak” leader in Albanese and his own strength and experience.

But it didn’t take long for Trump to become deeply unpopular in Australia. Following the two rounds of tariffs on Australia — steel and aluminum in March and then the “reciprocal” imposts of 10% in April — a poll by Resolve found 68% of those surveyed believed that Trump’s election win had been bad for the country. A third of voters said they were less likely to vote for Dutton because of Trump.

A survey by the Lowy Institute think tank released the same month found trust in the US had plunged to its lowest point in the poll’s history.

As Trump has become increasingly unpopular in Australia, Dutton’s approval ratings and his party’s support have dropped. These days, Dutton is less upbeat about Trump and has ditched policy proposals such as forcing government workers back into the office after criticism he was borrowing from the US president’s agenda.

Asked on the Rest Is Politics podcast over the Easter weekend whether or not Trump had sparked a positive turnaround in his polling, Albanese said the effect was far less than in Canada, but didn’t discount it entirely.

“Some of that can be overestimated,” Albanese told the UK-based podcast on Saturday. “Canada obviously has a border with the US and it’s pretty brutal and upfront, that division that is going on there.” The Australian prime minister added that the global “uncertainty” had likely had an impact on the 2025 election.