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.