Trump boomerang sinks Australia's right wing

[Zorro]

Aussies rejected “Make Australia Great Again” politics and reelected a progressive prime minister.

The boomerang was the brilliant invention of Australia’s Indigenous people. An angular, carefully crafted piece of wood, it has come to be used for actions or words that backfire on their originator.

It is thus appropriate that on Saturday, voters Down Under offered a potent lesson about the boomerang effect to Donald Trump and his MAGA faithful. The president hoped his dominance of the world stage would inspire an international swing toward the nationalist far right. Instead, Australians — angry and mystified by Trump’s tariffs — gifted their center-left prime minister, Anthony Albanese, whose Labor Party trailed in the polls only a few months ago, a landslide victory few predicted.

Labor’s triumph came less than a week after Canada’s voters, in an election even more clearly defined by Trump, rescued the center-left Liberal Party from the polling wilderness and ratified Mark Carney as their prime minister.

Two elections, of course, don’t make a global trend. A lot more was going on in Australia than an anti-Trump backlash. Albanese ran a disciplined campaign focused on health care, housing and other domestic issues. His conservative rival, Peter Dutton, made some mistakes and lost his own seat in the Labor tide. Wayne Swan, president of the Labor Party and former deputy prime minister, told me that Albanese won because “the economic imperative overrode the cultural imperative.”

https://wapo.st/4jB9RsB