Winning power is the easy part of politics. It’s what you do with it that counts.
That's going to be the challenge for Australia’s new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, after a striking election victory Saturday that has swept the right-of-center Liberal-National coalition from power after nine years.
The scale of victory for Albanese’s Labor party looks surprisingly modest. As a share of the governing House of Representatives, it’s likely to have the smallest majority for an incoming government since 1931. The extent of the calamity for the coalition, however, is unprecedented. Once all the votes are counted, it will struggle to end up with many more than 55 seats in the 150-seat House. That’s on par with the losses for Labor in 1996 and 2013 that locked it out of power for a decade. Relative to the size of the House, the coalition is likely to have its lowest seat total since it first won power in 1949.
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