Australia’s PM Albanese Re-Elected for Second Term, ABC Says

Anthony Albanese at a polling station in Sydney on May 3. Photographer: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg Photo by Brent Lewin /Bloomberg

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(Bloomberg) — Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was projected to be re-elected in Saturday’s vote, becoming the nation’s first leader in 21 years to win back-to-back elections.

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Albanese will enter his second term as a Labor hero after leading his party to successive election victories, according to projections by Australian Broadcasting Corp. It’s still unclear at this stage whether he will form a majority government.

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With voting having concluded in the final state of Western Australia at 8 p.m. Sydney time, early results saw a strong swing toward the ruling Labor Party in many seats held by the opposition Liberal-National Coalition. About half an hour later, the national broadcaster called the election in Labor’s favor.

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“The fact that we are in this position at 8:30 pm on election night is a tribute to Anthony Albanese and I think his campaign has been extraordinary,” Treasurer Jim Chalmers said. “He has dragged us back from a difficult position to what looks like it will be a winning position and he deserves the credit for that and I congratulate him.”

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Still, with a large number of pre-election day votes to be counted and those anticipated to fall heavily for the Coalition, it may be some time before the scale of the victory is clear. Early voting had been open for two weeks across Australia before election day and about 6.7 million people had cast their ballots, about a third of Australia’s entire electoral roll. 

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Albanese ran an almost faultless campaign against opposition leader Peter Dutton, turning around polls at the start of the year that had suggested the prime minister was headed for defeat. The center-left government had struggled during its first term with headwinds such as sticky inflation, high interest rates and a housing crunch that risked a voter backlash.

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Labor’s recovery was aided by global volatility sparked by US President Donald Trump’s tariff program, which he unveiled during the first week of the campaign. In Australia, offshore uncertainty tends to draw voters back toward the incumbent and this dovetailed with a more focused performance on the hustings from Albanese. 

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The prime minister campaigned on a platform of stability, while drawing comparisons between Dutton, a former Queensland policeman, and Trump, who is deeply unpopular in Australia. Labor’s win came days after Canada’s center-left government secured a fourth term, a result heavily influenced by expectations that new leader and ex-central banker Mark Carney would be able to manage the US leader.

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