Greens’ support to slide: Political trends to watch for in 2025

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By: Nick Dyrenfurth

With a federal election just months away, Donald Trump to be sworn in as US president next week and interest rates yet to fall, we live in tumultuous times. Here are five political predictions for 2025.

 

 

First, in geopolitics, the West will more assertively combine to oppose the threat of authoritarian powers including China, Russia, and Iran by strengthening our own democratic institutions, combating disinformation at home, supporting democratic movements abroad, and reaffirming the power of alliances against authoritarian aggression, as my colleague Adam Slonim recently argued.

 

 

Second, national security will retain its prominence in our politics but not be a significant vote switcher between Labor and the Coalition. Faux chest-beating patriotism, such as urging a boycott of Woolies, is so 2024. The biggest losers will be the Greens Party who have bet the house on adopting an extreme anti-Israel stance verging on rejecting a two-state solution. Not only does the Greens’ middle-class, university-educated and mostly environment-focused constituency have little truck with such antics, they have come to associate Adam Bandt’s federal (and state and territory) outfit with the corrosion of social cohesion and an explosion of antisemitism in Australia. They will go backwards in the House of Representatives. Should they win a seat such as Wills, it will be pyrrhic, cruelling hopes elsewhere for generations.

 

 

Third, there are forces of class realignment transforming electoral politics in the US, Britain, Europe and to a lesser extent Australia, which I and ALP strategist and pollster Kos Samaras have been warning of for decades now. Will 2025 be the year Australia follows the Trumpian playbook, leading to a further drift of non-university educated, working-class Australians – who make up 67 per cent of the population aged 15-74 – towards the party of mainstream conservatism led by Peter Dutton or the anti-establishment populist right? Various multicultural communities are not immune from this realignment either. (Just imagine if One Nation was led by someone other than Pauline Hanson, like the smartly attired, well-spoken leader of France’s far-right National Rally, Jordan Bardella, himself of immigrant stock.)

 

 

I suspect there will be further realignment in 2025, but we are at least an election away from a serious shifting of tectonic plates which gives the ALP time to culturally, policy and personnel-wise address this existential threat. If and when it does transpire it will have less to do with “anti-woke” sentiment – which is not merely the fantastical imagination of right-wing pundits – but the seismic anger of generations of Australians at an economic system which they feel is now gamed against them.

 

 

Relatedly, Labor’s decades-in-the-making problem with men, again largely working-class men, shifting right while women move leftwards, is a trend to watch for. “Women and their issues were at the centre in the 2022 election. They were an important reason why Scott Morrison was turfed out of office,” press gallery veteran Michelle Grattan recently observed, but it can cut both ways in 2025. Former police officer Dutton poses a threat to Albanese and can appeal to working women if he gets his economic message right. (He is alert to the dangers of playing with fire on abortion.) Until recently making this observation might have seen an ALP figure excommunicated – but nowadays, it is common sense.

 

 

The solution? What the Blue Labour movement, which emerged as a significant nation-building, economically progressive but small ‘c’ socially conservative faction within UK Labour in the 2010s and to a lesser extent in Australia, has long-argued: Labor must adopt and support MPs who believe in a left-conservatism, accepting that voters approve of an active role for the state in the economy but recoil at social and cultural extremism. A recent report by Samaras’ Redbridge Group, Left Right Out, found that a third of voters saw themselves as centrists, a third as right-of-centre, a quarter left-of-centre, and the remainder unsure. There are more conservative than progressive voters up for grabs. Add them to the majority bloc of non-radical progressives and you get a left-conservative super Labor majority.

 

 

These voters can only be won on material issues. This means Labor must use every month, every week, every hour and every minute before election day to repeat the same narrative: “Labor has brought down inflation without soaring unemployment and delivered consecutive budget surpluses, the first in 15 years. Wages are moving upwards again. Don’t risk the recovery with Dutton.”

 

 

Finally, Labor cannot underestimate Dutton. He is experienced, ruthless, disciplined and match fit. Polling shows that voters have warmed to him. But Labor will be saved by other weaknesses on the right. The Coalition’s campaign machinery, especially in Victoria, is widely regarded as inferior. Dutton’s team is comparatively weak, from shadow treasurer Angus Taylor to housing spokesman Michael Sukkar, who has outsourced the vitally important shadow ministry of housing to the Greens’ Max Chandler-Mather. The LNP’s soft underbelly will prove costly.

 

 

Ultimately, I suspect, Labor will avoid the anti-incumbent trend which swept much of the world in 2024, turfing out governments of all ideological persuasions. It will be a toss up between a slim majority Labor government or a minority administration. Both major parties can expect this to become the norm. Though Dutton will snatch some seats in suburban Australia, it will not be enough to form a government. One or two teal MPs might be picked off, but scarcely enough to make up for the devastation of 2022.

 

 

And it would be remiss not to mention the prime minister’s ability to grind out victories, internal and external. As a learned friend counselled me in late 2023: “People who bet against Albo generally lose.”

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