The Australian Labor Party has won the country’s federal election, with incumbent Prime Minister Anthony Albanese set for a second term in office.
With just over 75% of the vote counted by 4:30pm Canberra time on Sunday (8:30am CEST), Labor had received 35%, with the right-wing coalition between the Liberal and National parties tallying 32%, per the Australian Electoral Commission.
Those numbers brought projections that Labor would romp to a landslide victory in the country’s lower house. 76 seats are required for a governing majority – Labor had won at least 83 to the Liberal-National Coalition’s 35, according to Guardian Australia’s rolling projections.
Major local news outlets had all called the race for Albanese’s centre-left party by around 8:30pm Canberra time (12:30pm CEST) on Saturday, just two and a half hours after the last polls had closed.
Liberal leader and Albanese’s main challenger for the premiership, Peter Dutton, lost his seat in suburban Brisbane after 24 years as an MP. The tail-end of the campaign was punctuated by anxiety over global economic instability, with Dutton’s conservative bloc plagued by damaging comparisons to US President Donald Trump.
In a victory speech in Sydney, Albanese said that Australians had “chosen to face global challenges the Australian way, looking after each other while building for the future.”
Dutton conceded, congratulated Albanese, and said that his party would “rebuild.”
Albanese, whose estranged father was Italian, became Labor’s first prime minister in nearly a decade after winning the last election in 2022. He becomes the first Australian politician to lead a party to two federal election wins since the Liberal grandee John Howard won four consecutive elections from 1996-2004.
Analysts have suggested that a Labor victory could see movement towards completion of an EU-Australia trade deal, which has been negotiated on-and-off since 2018. Talks are currently stalled, but the EU’s trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič had in April committed to “fast track” their resumption following Australia’s election.
Australia’s is the second election this week in an anglophone country that saw a centrist incumbent overcome a challenge from the political right, following Liberal leader Mark Carney’s victory in Canada on Monday. Carney’s main challenger, the conservative Pierre Poilievre, also lost his seat.
In both cases, early opinion polls showed the conservative opponent leading comfortably, only for the incumbent to surge to a lead in late March or early April. Trump announced sweeping tariffs on 2 April, plunging global markets into turmoil.
Like EU countries Belgium and Luxembourg, Australia enforces a compulsory voting law, with turnout regularly above 90%.
While Labor’s victory is certain, manual vote counting in the vast country typically takes more than a week before a legal result can be declared.