Crisis on the right, part 5

(Get up to date with the full series here, here, here and here.)

Among the range of opinion polls that have signalled a deepening malaise for the Coalition over the last few weeks, one result particularly stood out. A RedBridge poll published last week in the Financial Review, which put One Nation seven points ahead of the Coalition, also included questions on leader ratings. Pauline Hanson had the best net favorability rating with minus three (38% favorable, 41% unfavorable), ahead of Anthony Albanese on minus ten (34%/44%) and Sussan Ley on minus 32 (10%/42%).

They also asked about a few others (Andrew Hastie did the best, but only because two-thirds had no opinion), including one non-Australian: Donald Trump. He managed an extraordinary minus 51 rating, with 67% unfavorable and only 16% favorable – easily the worst of the lot. So how does it happen that the most Trumpist leader is doing so well?

It supports the view I expressed yesterday, that there is a substantial bubble element to One Nation’s numbers. Many of those supporting it in the polls have no serious intention to do in real life. In an actual election campaign, when Hanson would be open to attack for her Trumpism as well as other weaknesses, Trump would turn out to be a major liability, just as he did last year for Pierre Poilievre and Peter Dutton.

The point is not just that Trump is more disliked than Hanson, but that he’s substantially more well known to the average voter. If his and her very different approval ratings are going to converge, it’s hers that are more likely to change: people have already made up their minds about Trump. As Peter Brent remarked recently, he “scares the bejeezus out of most Australian voters.”

But the anti-Trump campaign from Hanson’s rivals is yet to materialise, and not only because they have other things on their minds. Labor is reluctant to make an issue of Trump because it is in government and therefore needs to somehow work with him. The Coalition parties are equally reluctant because they have to deal with branch members who worship him. And the media don’t want to admit how unpopular Trump is because it would conflict with the narrative they’ve built up about his political genius.

And of course one particular arm of the media (or “media”) is complicit in the whole operation from day one: the role of News Corp is another thing that no-one wants to talk about. Its business model relies on stoking anger, and anger is One Nation’s stock-in-trade. It won’t be enough to win elections with, but it could easily be enough to create an unplayable field for the Coalition.

But if the Coalition is serious – or at some point were to get serious – about trying to regain credibility and take on One Nation, it could do a lot worse than have a look at Portugal. (Readers may remember that I drew attention to this last month.)

Portugal’s equivalent of our Coalition, called the Democratic Alliance, has been in office since 2024 under prime minister Luís Montenegro. It doesn’t have a parliamentary majority, but it has more seats than either of its main opponents, centre-left and far right, and they have not been willing to combine against it. It’s also unlike Australia in that it has a directly elected president, providing an additional test of electoral support and political tactics.

In the first round of the presidential election, left-of-centre candidates had 35.7% of the vote in total as against 34.8% for right-of-centre candidates. Two centrists had most of the rest: a liberal (the equivalent of our Teals) with 16.0% and an independent with 12.3%. (A joke candidate managed 1.1%.) So you might expect that the second round would be close between left and right.

But it wasn’t even remotely close [link added]. The right-of-centre candidate who made it to the runoff was from the far-right party, Chega, the equivalent of One Nation. He had 23.5% in the first round, but he only improved that to 33.2%. He received no endorsements from any of the other candidates; with varying degrees of enthusiasm they all backed his opponent from the centre-left, António José Seguro, who more than doubled his first-round total from 31.1% to 66.8%.

So while clearly some centre and centre-right voters backed the far right in the second round, it was only a minority. Democratic Alliance made no recommendation; Montenegro remained neutral, but his presidential candidate, Luís Marques Mendes, made it clear that he was supporting Seguro, who (in Google translate’s version) he called “the only candidate who comes close to the values ​​I have always defended: the defence of democracy, the guarantee of space for moderation.”

It’s possible. It’s possible for mainstream centre-right politicians to stand up for democracy and refuse collaboration with the far right – it’s happened in France and Germany as well. But when it comes to our Coalition parties such a thing seems frankly unbelievable. And that, much more than the divisions that Sussan Ley and David Littleproud have just papered over, indicates the real nature of their problem.

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PS: For the case against the reality of the One Nation surge, check out Andrea Carson and Finley Watson in the Conversation today.

PPS: And an intervention today by Malcolm Turnbull puts the point about News Corp better than I could: “This is the inevitable consequence for the Liberal Party of imagining that the goal of politics is to seek the approval of the Sky News audience. That may well represent many of the members of their branches, but it does not represent Australia.”