Trump and electoral coattails

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/04/2025 (185 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The dictionary defines a ‘horse whisperer’ as “someone who is skilled at training horses using gentle, non-violent methods based on understanding horse behaviour and psychology.” By that standard, the only ‘Trump-whisperer’ in Europe is Vladimir Putin (although Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni might get bit-parts in the movie).

The other far-right parties in big European countries (Rassemblement National in France, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, PiS in Poland, Reform in the United Kingdom) don’t know which way to look. They know that the U.S. Republican Party is in the same tradition, but European history has also taught them to recognize fascism when they see it.

They all do well in elections by being fascist-adjacent, but they start to shed votes if they get too explicit about their ideas. Nowhere do they get more than a third of the votes, whereas Donald Trump got more than half in the United States this time. They cannot follow him where he seems to be going, and many of them wouldn’t even want to.

A better measure of how Trumpism does in the export market will be found in the other parts of the “Anglosphere,” and happily there are two elections in that zone in the next two weeks, in Canada and Australia. They couldn’t be farther apart geographically, but with the great exception of the “French fact” in Quebec they couldn’t be closer in their history and politics.

The beauty of this experiment is that just three months ago, the opposition party in both countries was fairly far right and becoming more so — and that both parties were led by men who could reasonably be characterized as Trump-whisperers, or at least Trump wannabes. Most importantly, both parties expected to win the impending elections in a walk.

Both prime ministerial candidates, Peter Dutton of the conservative Coalition in Australia and Pierre Poilievre of the Conservative Party in Canada, concentrated on Trump’s main themes: immigration, crime, an end to the “indoctrination” of children in schools, and big cuts to “wasteful” government services. Dutton even proposed an agency like Elon Musk’s DOGE.

Indeed, while Poilievre has had great difficulty in taking his distance from Trump, Dutton has not even cut the umbilical cord. Not only did he promise to cancel offshore windfarms (a Trump obsession), but he even echoed The Donald’s claim that they harm whales. Australian pollster Peter Lewis says simply that people think Dutton is “too much like Trump.”

There is no doubt that it was Trump and only Trump who turned the elections in both Canada and Australia from surefire victories into certain defeats for the right-wing parties. When Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20 of this year, both conservatives were far ahead of their opponents, but their numbers began to slide almost immediately.

In Australia, a safe distance away from the United States, other factors were also in play, but a swing of almost ten points in three months suggests that the Trump factor was decisive. In Canada, where there was a swing of more than 20 points in two months, there can be no doubt that it was Trump who enabled Poilievre to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

To explain this we must move from the realm of facts and calculations to the slippery world of motives and emotions, because it seems pretty clear that these votes did not shift because of self-interest or ideological conviction. They were mostly driven, I think, by revulsion at the character of the man Donald Trump.

In Canada there was also a change of leader from the deeply unpopular Justin Trudeau to the relatively unknown Mark Carney, which lured some people back into the big Liberal tent. There was certainly outrage at Trump’s threats to crush the economy and take over the country, which doubtless moved more votes to Carney.

But none of that applies to Australia. There it is simple guilt by association that has brought Peter Dutton low and will probably cost him the election. It’s unworthy of me, I know, but I take a certain comfort from that.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.