The Incumbent Ws Keep On Coming

Australia and Singapore continue the incumbent winning streak

Albo’s Big Day (Photo Credit: Rick Rycroft/AP)

For much of the Australian election, the electoral predictions were a toss-up between a potential Coalition win or a Labor minority government. But like a repeat of the Canadian election, the incumbent center-left party won big.

Soon after the polls closed, Australia’s ABC News and other outlets reported that the center-left Labor Party would retain power, as the Coalition sees no path to victory. Anthony Albanese became the first Australian PM to win a second consecutive three-year term, in an election that morphed into a stability vote in favor of the incumbent party.

Meanwhile, Peter Dutton admitted defeat after losing his seat to Labor, saying, “We didn’t do well enough during this campaign, that much is obvious tonight, and I accept full responsibility for that.” Delivering a tearful victory speech, Albanese said, “The Australian people have voted for Australian values” in a “clear choice.”

By the time the dust settles, the Labor landslide is clear. The Labor Party won a healthy majority of 85 seats compared to the Liberals getting 37 seats, the Greens were wiped out with zero seats. It is the first time in decades that an incumbent government has gained seats in Parliament, giving Albanese a stunningly strong mandate.

Leading the incumbent party into the next election, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s 2022 victory was seen as a fresh start after nine years of conservative rule in Australia. However, global conditions like inflation have peeled off some support. At home, Albo’s campaign in the the Voice to Parliament referendum, which would have allowed First Nations people to get constitutional recognition, was widely critciized by opposition politicians and members of the public before the “Yes” campaign was decisively defeated in the voting box. Meanwhile, despite running on a climate-focused platform in 2022, Albanese’s governance has a mixed record with legislating a stronger emissions reduction target, while continuing to approve oil and gas projects. On foreign policy, Albo’s government has stabilized relations with China and France. For the campaign trail, the Liberals have pledged tax cuts and increased access to childcare, policies that the Coalition agrees with.

Like the Canadian election, the opposition’s connections with Donald Trump became a liability. Opposition leader Peter Dutton, who is head of the Liberal Party and the coalition with the center-right National Party, argued, "Because of Labor's bad decisions, Australians are doing it tough and they need help.” As a former police officer, Dutton vowed to fight for the "forgotten people" of Australia who were "fed up" with the "boisterous minority and the politically correct." As an often polarizing politician, many in Australia have linked Dutton’s rhetoric with that of Donald Trump. Dutton was also often involved in hot-button social issues, from boycotting the 2008 national apology to the Stolen Generations (A name given to tens of thousands of Aboriginal children who were forcibly taken from their families under infamous government policies until 1970), to being instrumental in the “No” campaign that brought down the Voice referendum. On the campaign trail, Dutton’s Coalition ran on cutting the fuel excise in half and restoring the number of mental health sessions subsidised by Medicare. On last Sunday’s final debate, Dutton said Indigenous "welcome to country" ceremonies are "overdone," and shouldn't be performed at sporting games or military commemorations.

A big pattern seen by the Australian election is how kitchen table issues were set aside to leader competency, fueled by Trump’s trade war. The biggest domestic policy issue is the cost-of-living that stems from the COVID pandemic and rising inflation. The Labor Party ran on a campaign to introduce an “instant tax reduction,” while the Coalition (A center-right combination of the Liberal and National Party) promised a one-off cost-of-living tax offset. However, as Tom McIlroy of The Guardian put it, “Like the undecided voter who asked Albanese and Dutton how they would protect Australia from Trump’s erratic decision-making in the first leaders’ debate on 10 April, fear of an unstable world was front-of-mind around the country.”

The Singapore election is another repeat of Canada and Australia’s electoral results. By the time the polls closed in Singapore, once again, it wasn’t even close. Although many expected the incumbent to win, the People’s Action Party won with a bigger 65.57% vote, while the opposition failed to make any breakthrough. In a sense of how big the PAP’s win was, the vote was a reversal of its 2020 popular vote of 61.24%. Six group representation constituencies (GRC) and four single seats scoring at least 75% for the PAP, and three of them won with at least 80% of the vote.

Analysts say the landslide win is due to voter worries about an economy hit by global turbulence, and giving the PM Lawrence Wong a strong mandate heading into a new term. In recent weeks, Wong has received praise and recognition as a technocrat who calmly deals with international crises (A reputation first gained from the COVID pandemic) by smartly handling Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, which he famously said was the US “rejecting the very system that it created.”

If you have guessed that the key issues Singaporeans are focused on are the economy and housing, give yourself a pat on the back because you are correct. Wong said in his first rally speech that the ruling party’s “first and most urgent priority” is to address cost-of-living and job concerns, while housing affordability has not gotten any better for Singaporeans. At the same time, competition with foreign workers for high-quality jobs and better wages requires Wong to strike a balance between addressing locals’ financial and social concerns and opening up to foreign talent coming from around the world (Most notably, sucking much talent and resources from Hong Kong). The PAP ran on a campaign of building more public housing and ensuring more jobs for Singaporeans, while the main opposition Workers’ Party pushed a platform of improving government accountability, reducing the pressures of a cost-of-living crisis, and boosting the country’s trade relations.

Many analysts and pundits will start writing about how the “Trump effect” is a big deal that swung the elections of three countries back to their incumbents, following a bashing of those in power last year. In my view, don’t bet on it. These three countries are typically less populist countries beset by grievances and angst, as demonstrated in the UK’s by-elections on Thursday and the upcoming Romanian election, the populists still have an edge.

However, it is good to know that right-wing politicians running on populist rhetoric cannot win, and for that, it marks a small and satisfying win.