Australia Joins the Populist Wave

Polling in Australia shows that support for populism has risen dramatically, to a level that has more typically been experienced in many other Western countries. The rise of the populist Right party One Nation signals that Australia has joined a wider current of electoral realignment that is fundamentally about values rather than economic interests.

Populist parties define themselves against the elite and for “the people,” though left-wing and right-wing populists differ somewhat over who they consider the elite and how they define the people. This reflects a wider Western process of electoral realignment that hinges on culture rather than economics or leadership.

A recent poll of polls (dated 23 February) of voting intention has indicated that 25 percent of the Australian electorate would give their primary vote to One Nation. That is similar to the current numbers for the Sweden Democrats, Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Dutch parties PVV and FvD, RN in France, Reform Party in Britain, Freedom Party in Austria, and Vlaams Belang in Belgium. In Italy, populist Right support (i.e., support for Brothers of Italy and Lega) is about ten points higher, while in Spain, Greece, the Baltic states, and Portugal, support for populist Right parties is a bit lower, in the teens.

However, the populist Right is not surging everywhere: New Zealand First has risen to only around 10 percent, a level of support that is at the high end of its historical range. In Canada, support for the People’s Party (PPC) is in the low single digits, and in Ireland, the nascent Freedom Party and National Party remain tiny. There is no important populist Right vote in Malta or Iceland.

These exceptions demand some attention, as does the strength of the populist Right across low-immigration eastern EU countries such as Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and Czechia, or regions such as eastern Germany. Broadly speaking, there is very little populism in Maltese and Icelandic politics because those countries have had low levels of non-European immigration, whereas the eastern EU countries are more culturally nationalist and strongly anti-leftist due to their collective memory and having a weaker imprint of post-1960s elite cultural progressivism.

The emergence of an anti-immigration populist Right in Europe began in the 1990s, tied in part to rising refugee flows from the former Yugoslavia. At that time, support for this flavour of politics was half what it is today: compare Jean-Marie Le Pen’s “shocking” 18 percent share of the vote in the second round of the French presidential election in 2002 with his daughter’s 42 percent; or, in Austria, Jörg Haider’s stunning 27 percent in 1999 with Norbert Hofer’s by then quotidian 46 percent in 2016 (though admittedly these results are not directly comparable, since one was a general election and the other a presidential run-off). What once caused horror is now met with resignation. Moreover, populist Right parties were strong in only a few Western countries in the 1990s, while they are strong in many of them today.

The 2000s and early 2010s were a period of stable populist performance. That was the calm before the storm. Then came the ‘populist moment’ of 2014, which ushered in our current era. Figure 1 shows a sudden rise in 2015 of the populist Right share (the blue bars) after five years of little movement. 2014 marked the beginning of a migration surge into Europe that, in the summer of 2015, swelled into the European ‘Migrant Crisis.’ In its peak years of 2015–16, this involved at least 2.3 million asylum seekers coming across the Mediterranean from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea, and several other African countries. Germany and Sweden initially adopted a welcoming attitude, symbolised by Angela Merkel’s fateful statement “Wir schaffen das!” (“We can do this!”). The Migrant Crisis effectively launched the AfD and Sweden Democrats to prominence and boosted the fortunes of the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, among others. Arguably, Brexit would not have taken place without it: many Brexit voters named immigration their leading issue, while fear of a border open to Europe and its migrant flows was a key feature of Nigel Farage’s campaign to leave the EU. In 2016, Britain voted 52–48 to leave. Soon after, Donald Trump, the first post-war Republican to make immigration a centrepiece of his message, was elected US president.

How should we understand the post-2014 rise of national populism? First, it’s the immigration, stupid. According to one study, 99 percent of Sweden Democrat voters canvassed said they wanted reduced immigration, while 100 percent of AfD voters surveyed in Bavaria in another study agreed with the statement “Germany is gradually losing its culture.” In Australia, 96 percent of One Nation voters surveyed said that immigration has “gone much too far” compared to 45–50 percent of Liberal-National voters, 17 percent of Labor voters, and 6 percent of Green voters.  

A recently published study of right-wing voting behaviour in EU countries and Norway shows that immigration attitudes are the most important predictor of populist right voting. Meanwhile, there is a near-consensus that personal economic circumstances, such as being poor or unemployed, do not explain immigration attitudes. Rurality, after controlling for demographic factors, is a weak predictor: despite the mythology, middle-aged white British Londoners without degrees are as likely to have voted Brexit as their counterparts in rural or provincial England. Leave voters in 2016 were far less likely than Remain voters to say that inequality was the most important issue facing Britain. The “left behind” thesis should be left behind.

It is also vital to distinguish immigration attitudes from the ranking of immigration on people’s priority lists. Attitudes such as that we should “reduce a lot” or “increase” immigration are heavily tied to a person’s ideology. Salience, which refers to whether reducing immigration is a high or low priority for a voter, is more closely associated with actual immigration levels—especially illegal or irregular inflows—which also drive media and social media headlines. This, in turn, shapes populist voting.

In a study of twelve Western European countries, James Dennison and Andrew Geddes found that as the salience of immigration rose or fell among voters in the 2005–18 period, populist parties increased or decreased their vote share. My own co-authored work also shows that those who want less immigration tend to be more motivated by this issue than pro-immigration voters—and thus more likely to switch their vote to a restrictionist party. At times of high immigration, the issue of immigration becomes salient, and pro-immigration parties are penalised while national populists are boosted.

In Australia, as in Britain and Canada, the immigration taps were opened to unprecedented levels after the pandemic. Net long-term numbers were approaching 500,000 in 2024. This in a country with only half of Britain’s population. Similar-sized surges took place in Canada and Ireland. These waves hit many countries whose foreign-born inhabitants as a share of their populations had reached historic highs. The responses have varied: In the US, Trump was re-elected in 2024, Ireland and Britain were rocked by anti-immigration protests, Reform surged in Britain, immigration shot up the agenda in Canada, and national populism took off from mid-2025 in Australia.

Disuniting Australia

What happens when the values of multiculturalism conflict with homophobic, misogynistic, and deeply anti-democratic strains of Islam?

The common factor is high immigration, symbolising rapid ethnocultural change at a time of unprecedented declines in ethnic majority share. In an experiment, white Americans who were informed that the country would become majority non-white in 2050 became more likely to support immigration restrictions and Trump. In Britain, a study has shown that informing people that higher immigration will accelerate the decline of the white British share causes restrictionist sentiment to jump 20–25 points.

However, immigration levels, which drive demand for national populism, are not a sufficient explanation. The supply side also counts. When mainstream parties such as Trump’s Republicans, Orban’s Fidesz or the Danish Social Democrats act to restrict immigration, there is no space for a populist third party. However, where politically correct taboos around discussing immigration hold sway, as in the pre-Trump Republican Party or in Sweden before 2015, this blocks mainstream parties from addressing the concerns of many voters. As was the case when the Soviet department store GUM sold only one colour of pants and the demand for blue jeans was met by the black market, populists are political black marketeers catering to forbidden demand.

An additional factor is that political elites, even those on the right, tend to be liberal on immigration, crime and other social issues. After the lesson of 2015–16, mainstream right-wing parties have become more willing to criticise immigration, tossing red meat to their bases. As a result, mainstream conservatives such as Mark Rutte in the Netherlands and Theresa May in Britain managed to win votes back from populists. However, once in office, these fiscally conservative but socially liberal parties did not prioritise restricting immigration, and they have been swayed by pro-immigration business and humanitarian lobbies. In Britain, David Cameron promised, but failed, to reduce immigration from the 200,000–300,000 range to the “tens of thousands,” thus giving oxygen to UKIP in 2015 and Brexit in 2016. Likewise, Boris Johnson won over most Brexit voters in 2019 by promising to “get Brexit done.” Many assumed Johnson would lower net migration to the “tens of thousands,” but, instead, he sent it hurtling to well over 700,000 per year. It can take as long as a year or two for voters to realise what is happening to immigration levels. When they do, they will often punish the incumbent conservative party for not delivering on their promises. This is why the Tory brand has collapsed among Brexit voters since 2022, while Reform is on nearly thirty percent of the vote and in a position to win a majority.

New World societies are more similar to than different from European countries. While they have traditions of immigration, Anglo settler societies that were formed around dominant Anglo-Protestant or Anglo-Celtic majorities have, over time, assimilated other white groups into more inclusive “white” majorities since the 1960s. Ethnic change has proven problematic in these societies, as in Europe. In contrast to the United States, where Trump’s restrictionism overthrew the business-liberal Republican Party establishment in 2015, the Australian Liberal-Nationals remained relatively liberal on immigration, promising only limited cuts to levels of immigration that were at the high end compared with other OECD countries. This stance exposed them to populist challenge.

One reason One Nation’s Canadian cousin, The People’s Party (PPC) has not surged is because Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives sound more populist than past Conservative governments and they have not had a chance to disappoint in office since Trudeau’s woke Liberals gained power in 2015. If Canadian Tories were elected and they presided over high immigration, I would predict fertile conditions for the rise of the PPC. In Ireland, the old political fault lines are breaking up, but no organised and charismatic populist contender has emerged to consolidate the rising anti-immigration vote. One thing we know, however, is that only a fool would bet on continued Irish and Canadian exceptionalism with respect to a lack of strong populist right parties. Germany, Britain, Sweden, and Australia were all once in that position, but that is no longer the case.

Stepping back from the froth of the news cycle allows us to glimpse the broader political landscape of our age. Low birth rates and increasingly post-national elite cultures have facilitated brisk immigration, record foreign-born population shares and swift ethnic change. The Anglo settler societies are likely to lose their white majorities after 2050, and Western Europe will follow a few decades later. As Australia-based political psychologist Karen Stenner observes, this change will disorient an important group of voters who view change as loss and difference as disorderly. Immigration is a lightning rod for this discontent, and national populists have capitalised on it. As a consequence, the old left–right economic cleavage of politics, which created our established parties, is being displaced by the newer globalist–nationalist divide over immigration and the national past.

This realignment has reached Australian shores, drawing the country into the political current that is likely to dominate the West in the coming decades.