For the second time in a single week the center-left party of a large British Dominion country that appeared to be doomed before convicted felon President Trump returned to office turned things around in a snap election, bolstering the incumbent prime minister’s political standing and, adding insult to injury for the center-right wingers, their leader lost his seat in Parliament, 9News reports.
There were some differences as the Tories in Canada definitely did better than the LNP in Australia, gaining 23 seats mostly at the expense of smaller parties while Canadian Libs gained 17. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Libs are three seats short of a majority and will need to scrape up a few from the minor parties to form a coalition, whereas his Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese’s party now holds 86 seats in the 150-seat House. Tory leader Pierre Poilievre will soon have another shot to return to Parliament by running in a byelection in Alberta after the Tory MP there gave up his seat (the dude previously repped a district right outside Ottawa. Why the hell he’s allowed to suddenly just pretend he’s from a town 1,000 miles west is unclear). It does not appear that Australian LNP leader Peter Dutton – the first ever opposition leader in Aussie history to lose their seat in a national election – will be so lucky as there’s no similar tradition down under.
There’s one other major difference in the first national elections held in the two most America-like of foreign countries since November 2024, the one billed in the headline: An explicitly pro-Trump upstart party called “Trumpet of Patriots” – its slogan “Make Australia Great Again” as if the name wasn’t making it obvious enough – was completely shut out of the election, winning zero seats, and may very well be closing down altogether as the Nightly reports its leader Suellen Wrightson locked her social media accounts after conceding defeat in her run for a New South Wales seat.
Businessman Clive Palmer launched Trumpets of Patriots in February with the explicit promise to remake Australia in the Orange God Emperor’s image, touting Wrightson as “the next prime minister,” and pissing away $6.8 million AUD on ads and spam texts that enraged recipients, only to win 3.4 percent of the vote nationally and zero seats in the country’s House of Representatives.