One Nation: How a 6% Party Topped Australia's Polls

Transcript

Sam: A year ago, one in fifteen Australians backed this party. A rounding error.

Alex: Twelve months later? Number one. Ahead of Labor, ahead of the Coalition — the most popular brand in the country.

Sam: And the reason I couldn't let it go? That's not the Australian story. It's the global one.

Alex: Welcome back to Dan's Rabbit Holes — the show where we take one thing that's genuinely nagging at someone, and we chase it all the way down until it actually makes sense.

Sam: And this one's a proper hole. I'm Sam, that's Alex, and if you're new here, the whole thing is Dan's idea. As he puts it: one episode, one thing I can't stop thinking about, taken all the way to genuine understanding. Politics, people, science — whatever's caught my attention.

Alex: This week, what caught his attention is a number that shouldn't be possible. Pauline Hanson's One Nation — a party a lot of people had filed under "nineties nostalgia" — spent the middle of 2026 sitting first in poll after poll. Not tied. First. Ahead of both parties that have basically run the country since the 1940s.

Sam: So the obvious question is "how on earth did that happen." But the reason this actually became a rabbit hole is that the obvious question turns out to be the boring one.

Alex: Right. Because the interesting question isn't really about Hanson, or even about Australia. It's this: what is pushing tens of millions of people, in rich, stable, comfortable democracies, to walk away from the parties their parents and grandparents voted for — and hand their vote instead to movements built on grievance and distrust?

Sam: And here's where we're taking you. First, the shock itself — how fast this happened, because the speed is the whole thing. Then we rewind twenty years, because One Nation has actually died before, and whether this time is different is the key tell. Then the bit I found weirdly gripping: Australia's voting system, and why a party can lead the entire country and still be nowhere near power.

Alex: And then we leave Australia completely. Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, France, the United States — because the same rise is happening everywhere, and lining them up side by side tells you something you cannot see from inside any one country. And finally: how does this end? There are basically four ways it stops, and every single one of them has a sting in the tail.

Sam: There's one country everyone points to as the place that actually beat the far right. And how they did it kind of broke my brain. But we'll earn that one.

Alex: We will. Quick thing before we dive: if you enjoy the show, do the one thing that helps it most — hit follow, whatever app you're in. It's free, it takes a second, and it means the next hole lands in your feed automatically.

Sam: Okay. The shock. Give me the speed.

Alex: So set the baseline. May 2025, the federal election. One Nation runs candidates all over the country and wins 6.4 percent of the first-preference vote for the House of Representatives.

Sam: And 6.4 percent is — what, in context? Small.

Alex: Small in seats, but here's what everyone missed at the time: 6.4 was actually the second-best result the party had ever had. It just got buried, because Labor won in a landslide that night and nobody was looking at the minor parties.

Sam: So it's quietly having one of its best-ever runs and the whole country's ignoring it.

Alex: Ignoring it completely. Now jump forward barely twelve months. June 2026. A Roy Morgan poll — one of the big national pollsters — puts One Nation on 29.5 percent of the primary vote. Labor's on 26. The Coalition, the main conservative side, is down at 17.5.

Sam: Hang on. 29.5 to Labor's 26 — it's actually in front?

Alex: In front. And it's the first time in that pollster's entire history that One Nation has led both major parties at the same time. And it wasn't one rogue reading — a Redbridge poll had them at 31, a YouGov poll at 29. Three different pollsters, same story.

Sam: Okay, that's the part I want to sit on, because you always hear "oh, it's one weird poll." Three pollsters all landing in the same place is a completely different animal.

Alex: Completely different animal. And there's a trigger you can actually point at. In May, the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, hands down the federal budget. In the weeks after that, One Nation picks up something like five to ten points. So there's a real "cost of living, and the government isn't helping me" moment lighting the fuse.

Sam: And just to sit on the scale for a second — 6.4 to basically thirty. That's not gaining a few points. That's more than quadrupling in a year.

Alex: More than quadrupling. And here's a detail that makes it heavier: in Australia, voting is compulsory. Everyone turns out. So this can't be the usual trick where your side gets fired up and the other side stays home. There's no turnout illusion hiding in it. If the number moved this far, it's because real people picked up their vote and carried it somewhere else.

Sam: So it's genuine switching, not just enthusiasm. That's scarier, honestly. But polls are still people talking to pollsters. Has any of this shown up where it actually counts — in real votes?

Alex: That's exactly the right pushback, and yes. And that's what tips this from noisy to serious. March 2026. South Australia holds a state election. One Nation takes 21 percent of the vote — and finishes ahead of the Liberal Party.

Sam: Ahead of one of the actual major parties. In a real election, with real ballots.

Alex: In a real election. The Liberals collapse to 19 percent — their worst result ever in that state — and they go from sixteen seats down to five.

Sam: Sixteen to five. That's not a bad night. That's a party falling through the floor.

Alex: And then two months later, May 2026, there's a by-election in a federal seat called Farrer — regional New South Wales, farming country. One Nation's candidate, David Farley, wins it, beating an independent. And that matters more than it sounds, because it's the first time in the party's entire history that a One Nation candidate has been directly elected into the House of Representatives.

Sam: Wait — the first time ever? They've been around since the nineties and they'd never once won a lower-house seat at the ballot box?

Alex: Never. They'd had senators, but never a directly-elected member of the House. And here's the detail that really tells the story: that seat had been held by the Liberals and Nationals for about eighty years. The by-election only happened because the sitting member, Sussan Ley — who had very briefly led the Liberal Party before losing the leadership to Angus Taylor — resigned.

Sam: So let me make sure I've got the picture. A party that could not win a single one of these seats at the general election a year earlier just took one — off the former Liberal leader's own turf, a seat they'd basically owned since before the Second World War.

Alex: That's the picture. And that's why "it's just polls" doesn't hold up. It's polls, plus a state election where they beat a major party, plus a real seat won on real ballots. Three completely different kinds of evidence, all pointing the same direction.

Sam: And beating the Liberals in an actual state election — that's not just a data point, is it. That's a psychological event for the Coalition. That's the moment their own people start whispering, "we're losing our base to these guys."

Alex: That's exactly the subtext — and hold it, because it becomes the hinge of the whole forecast at the end. When your voters don't just grumble but actually walk — in a real election, in real numbers — the party they walked out on stops treating you as a nuisance and starts treating you as an existential threat.

Sam: Okay. So that's the "oh wow." But you teased that the speed is a trap — that the really telling thing is the long history. So take me back. Because you said they've died before.

Alex: They have. And this is where you have to zoom out, because One Nation has done a version of this before, and the shape of the long story is the single best guide to whether this time is real. So — 1997. The party gets founded, right after Hanson's famous, incendiary first speech in Parliament. And the first act is explosive and short.

Sam: Explosive how?

Alex: 1998, Queensland state election: they win 22.7 percent of the vote and eleven seats. Overnight, they're the second-biggest party in the state. Federally that same year, 8.4 percent of the House vote — third-highest of any party — and they get a senator elected. And then it just... detonates.

Sam: Detonates meaning it loses, or meaning it falls apart?

Alex: Falls apart, from the inside. Constant internal feuds, legal trouble — Hanson herself was actually jailed in 2003 on electoral-fraud charges that were later overturned on appeal. The vote craters to 4.3 percent in 2001, and then for the better part of a decade — 2004 through 2013 — the party is basically electorally dead. A punchline. A fraction of a percent.

Sam: So if you were watching in, say, 2008, you'd have said "well, that was a weird spike in the nineties, glad that's over."

Alex: You absolutely would have. And that's the trap, because act two starts, very quietly, in 2016. There's a specific quirk that year — a double-dissolution election, which basically halves the number of votes you need to win a Senate seat.

Sam: Sorry — "double dissolution," that's the thing where they dissolve both houses of Parliament at once?

Alex: Both houses, everyone's up for re-election, and the maths of it drops the bar for the Senate. And One Nation slips four senators in through that lower bar, including Hanson herself. And from that little beachhead, they climb — slowly, unglamorously. 3.1 percent of the House vote in 2019. 4.9 in 2022, the first year they run a full slate of candidates. 6.4 in 2025.

Sam: So this is the contrast you wanted me to see. The nineties was one big firework. This time it's a — what, a staircase?

Alex: A staircase is exactly right. And the ten-years-of-climbing part is doing a lot of work in that word. A protest party that flames out in one election is a curiosity — a mood, gone as fast as it came. But a party that has climbed patiently for a decade and then triples its support in a single year — that's not a firework. That's a realignment. Something structural underneath has actually moved.

Sam: Moved how, though? What's the structural thing that's actually moved?

Alex: That's the real question, and we'll get to the full answer — but here's the frame to carry in. One Nation isn't the cause of any of this. It's the beneficiary. The thing that's genuinely moved is the slow death of the two-party system that's organised Australian life since the 1940s. One Nation is just the vehicle that decades of disillusionment have picked up and put their weight behind — for now. If it weren't One Nation, it'd be something wearing a different name.

Sam: So the party's almost incidental. It's a symptom that's grown big enough to look like the disease.

Alex: That's exactly it — and hold that, because it's why "just beat One Nation" turns out to be so much harder than it sounds.

Sam: Okay. And you treat those two things — the flare and the slope — completely differently, don't you. A flare you just wait out. A slope, you can't.

Alex: You can't wait out a slope. That's the whole distinction. And it's worth being clear on why the first one flared out, because it tells you what's different now. The nineties spike was one overheated election, riding a very specific panic, on a party that was basically Hanson plus a handful of allies who promptly fell out with each other. There was nothing underneath it — no machine, no money, no discipline — so the moment the panic passed and the egos clashed, it just collapsed.

Sam: Whereas this time there's an actual structure under it that can survive a bad week.

Alex: There is. And here's one concrete sign of that: back then, the joke was that One Nation was basically Hanson and a fax machine. Now there's serious money and infrastructure behind it. Which is a whole story on its own — quick aside, if the "who's actually funding this" question grabs you, it's the very first hole we ever went down on this show. Episode one, "The Iron Ore Insurance Policy" — how Australia's richest person, Gina Rinehart, quietly bankrolls One Nation. Worth a listen after this one.

Sam: Noted. And I'm guessing that money is part of why the staircase keeps going up instead of collapsing again like it did last time.

Alex: That's the theory. Money buys you a machine that survives between elections instead of imploding after one. And one more marker that the ground has moved: in December 2025, Barnaby Joyce — a former Deputy Prime Minister of the country — defects and joins One Nation. When ex-Deputy PMs are crossing the floor to you, you have stopped being a fringe.

Sam: Okay, so if I just try to answer the simple question — how powerful are they, actually — what's the honest number? Because "first in the polls" and "won basically one seat" feel like they can't both be true.

Alex: And that tension is the single most important thing about this party. There is no one number, because votes and seats tell you almost opposite stories. By the measure of votes, One Nation is a major force and getting bigger: second-best-ever federal result, first in the 2026 polls, beat a major party in South Australia. By the measure of seats? Tiny.

Sam: How tiny?

Alex: In the 150-seat House of Representatives, they have two members. One who won Farrer, and Joyce, the defector. Two out of 150.

Sam: Two. When they're polling thirty percent.

Alex: Two. In the Senate they've got four out of seventy-six. In the state upper houses — New South Wales, Western Australia, Victoria — a scattering of seats. And in South Australia's lower house they finally won seats for the first time since 1982. But at the local council level, where politics is closest to the ground? Basically nothing.

Sam: That's such a strange footprint, though. Massive in the polls, real in the Senate and the state upper houses, and then almost invisible at both ends — nothing local, and barely anything in the House.

Alex: And that lopsided footprint is the tell. It's not random. It maps exactly onto which chambers use which gearbox — they show up wherever the counting rewards a 20-to-30 percent vote, and they vanish wherever it punishes one. Which is the thing we have to explain next.

Sam: So there's this enormous gap between how many people vote for them and how much of Parliament they actually hold. And I feel like you're about to tell me that gap is not an accident.

Alex: It is not an accident. That gap is manufactured — deliberately — by the design of the Australian voting system. And that gap is the single biggest thing standing between One Nation and real power. Which is the rabbit hole inside the rabbit hole. So let's actually climb down into it.

Sam: Right, explain this to me like I'm smart but I have genuinely never thought about how Australians vote. Because in a lot of countries, thirty percent of the vote is roughly thirty percent of the seats, and this is clearly not that.

Alex: It's not that at all. Australia does not do first-past-the-post — the "whoever gets the most votes wins the seat" system. It uses something called compulsory preferential voting. So when you vote, you don't just pick one. You rank the candidates. One, two, three, all the way down the list.

Sam: Okay, and what does the ranking actually do?

Alex: Here's the mechanic. To win a seat, you don't need the most votes — you need a majority. More than half. So they count everyone's first choice. If nobody's over fifty percent, they take the candidate who came last, eliminate them, and look at who those voters put second. Those votes get redistributed. And they keep doing that — knock out the bottom, pass the votes up everyone's rankings — until somebody clears fifty percent.

Sam: Oh — so your vote doesn't die if your first pick is a no-hoper. It just flows to your next choice.

Alex: Your vote flows. And here's the image I find useful: think of the electoral system as a gearbox. The votes go in one end, but the machinery in the middle decides what they actually turn into on the other end. And in almost every Australian seat, the gears grind it all down to a final two — Labor versus the Coalition. So for a minor party to actually win, it has to pile up a huge first-preference vote before those redistributed preferences start delivering it seats instead of leaking away to the big two.

Sam: Can you make that concrete? Picture me one actual seat.

Alex: Sure. Imagine a country seat. One Nation gets 35 percent of first preferences, Labor 33, the Liberals 22, the Greens 10. One Nation's "winning," right? Biggest pile. But nobody's over fifty. So you knock out the Greens — their preferences mostly flow to Labor. Labor climbs. Then you knock out the Liberals, and this is the crux: where do those Liberal preferences go? If they flow to One Nation, One Nation wins. But if enough of them flow to Labor, or just scatter, Labor gets over the line first — even though One Nation led every step until the last one.

Sam: So the whole seat comes down to where the third-placed party's voters put their number two. One Nation can lead the entire count and lose it at the very last step.

Alex: Lead the whole way, lose it at the wire. And historically, enough of those preferences have leaked that One Nation turns a massive vote into almost no seats. Put real numbers on it: that June poll where they led on 29.5 percent? Once you simulate the full preferential count — everyone's rankings redistributed — Labor still beats them, roughly 56 to 44. First on primaries, still losing the two-party count by twelve points.

Sam: So the system takes a thirty percent vote and hands back two seats out of a hundred and fifty. That's genuinely wild. It's like coming first in every heat and still not making the final because of how they total up the points.

Alex: That's a really good way to put it — leading the heats, missing the final. In Australia's system, a big pile of first preferences is leverage. It is not power. And those are two genuinely different things.

Sam: But — okay, I want to push, because you keep calling it a firewall holding the party back. Firewalls can fail. Is there a version where this one stops working?

Alex: That is exactly the right instinct, and yes. Watch what the preferences are actually doing. Take a New South Wales seat like Hunter, in the 2025 election. When Coalition voters got knocked out and their preferences flowed, they went to One Nation over Labor at a rate above 80 percent.

Sam: Eighty percent. So the two right-of-centre blocs are basically behaving like one team now.

Alex: Increasingly like one team. And then look at South Australia in 2026. By that election, roughly two-thirds of One Nation's support was coming through as a first preference — not as a fallback, not as somebody's grudging second choice. First choice.

Sam: Wait, walk me through why that's the big one, because I think I see it but I want to be sure.

Alex: It's the whole ballgame. The old world was: you vote Liberal first, and maybe One Nation gets your second preference as a little protest. The firewall works precisely because those are still fundamentally Liberal voters, just lending a preference. But if two-thirds of One Nation's vote is now first preferences, those people aren't preferencing One Nation anymore. They've defected to it outright. They've changed teams.

Sam: And the entire firewall depends on the two right-wing parties staying separate. The moment their voters merge into one bloc, the machinery that's been capping One Nation stops working.

Alex: That's the crack in the wall. For now, the preferential system is a real barrier — it's why thirty percent becomes two seats. But a wall only holds while the two conservative parties stay distinct. And the ground under that assumption is very visibly moving. Hold onto that, because it comes back at the very end in a way you will not see coming.

Sam: Ominous. Okay — but none of this explains why it's happening. The system explains why they're capped. It doesn't explain why a third of the country suddenly wants them. So: who are these voters, and what do they actually want?

Alex: So the country has this big, serious academic survey — the Australian Election Study — that basically asks the whole nation who they voted for and why. And when you look at who's moving to One Nation, the picture is really clear. It's strongest among voters over 55. Among people without a university degree. And in rural and regional Australia, outside the big cities.

Sam: Older, non-degree, regional. Okay — that's sort of the stereotype, isn't it? The classic protest voter.

Alex: It is the stereotype. But two details blow the stereotype apart, and both of them matter enormously. First: where are these voters coming from? They're not new conservatives appearing out of nowhere. They're being drawn straight out of the Coalition. Among 2025 Coalition voters who are older, don't have a degree, and live in the regions, as many as one in three had swung to One Nation by 2026.

Sam: One in three. So the mainstream conservative party is bleeding a third of that part of its own base to the party on its right.

Alex: A third of that slice, yes. And the second detail is the emotional core of this entire phenomenon. One Nation voters are the most distrustful electorate in the country. 74 percent of them say politicians "usually just look after themselves."

Sam: Seventy-four percent. That's not a policy position. That's a worldview. That's "the whole thing is a racket, top to bottom."

Alex: That's exactly what it is — and hold that number, because it explains an enormous amount later. But here's where the stereotype actually breaks. You picture the angry older bloke, right? The reality is much broader. One Nation now polls in double digits across every single age group. Even the under-30s are around ten percent now. And the support is only weakly split by gender. This is not a narrow demographic pocket. It's a broad-based movement.

Sam: Huh. So it's not just Grandad shouting at the telly. It's genuinely wider than that.

Alex: Much wider. And here's a subtlety worth holding: because that vote is being drawn out of the Coalition rather than from some brand-new pool of conservatives, the total right-of-centre vote isn't necessarily growing. It's being redistributed — moving further right within itself.

Sam: Oh, that's an important distinction. So it's not that the country lurched right overnight. It's that the existing right is reorganising — the same voters migrating to a harder-edged version of themselves.

Alex: Precisely. And there's one thread running through all of it that ties Australia to the entire rest of the world — and it's the education one. Because right across the Western world, the thing that now best predicts a far-right vote isn't income, and it isn't class the way we used to mean it. It's whether or not you have a university degree.

Sam: Really? Just — degree, or no degree?

Alex: That has become the great dividing line. Graduates in the big cities vote one way; non-graduates in the towns and the regions vote another. And One Nation sits exactly on the non-graduate, non-city side of that line — which is precisely where the Sweden Democrats sit in Sweden, where the National Rally sits in France, where the Trump coalition sits in the United States.

Sam: But why would a degree, of all things, be the predictor? That feels almost too neat. What's actually going on underneath "graduate versus non-graduate"?

Alex: The way I'd read it, it's less about the diploma itself and more about what the diploma has become a marker for. Getting a degree tends to sort you — into a big city, into a certain kind of work, into a social world that's fairly comfortable with rapid change, with globalisation, with immigration. And staying a non-graduate means you're more likely to still be in the town you grew up in, in work that's exposed to those forces rather than cushioned from them. So it isn't "smart versus not." It's two completely different lived experiences of the last thirty years.

Sam: One group that mostly won from all the churn, and one that mostly paid for it.

Alex: That's the fault line. And the people who feel like they paid for it are exactly the ones reaching for the party that tells them the churn was done to them on purpose. The degree is just the cleanest line you can draw on a map of who feels like a winner and who feels like a loser from the way the world's been run. Which sets up the real question — why is it igniting now?

Sam: Yeah — because all of that: older, non-degree, regional, distrustful — that's been true for a long time. Those people didn't appear in 2024. So why is it going off now?

Alex: Four forces are converging. And the most powerful one is also the slowest and least visible — it's been building for thirty years, and it's the one you can't feel day to day. It has a slightly wonky name: dealignment.

Sam: Dealignment. Okay, unpack that, because it sounds like political-science jargon.

Alex: It just means the slow loosening of the bond between voters and the two big parties. Here's how you actually see it. Back in 1987, 84 percent of Australians said they felt close to either Labor or the Coalition. By 2025, that had fallen to 55 percent. And for the first time on record, the number of people attached to no major party at all outnumbered committed Liberals.

Sam: So the loyalty is just... evaporating.

Alex: Evaporating, generation by generation. In the 1960s, more than 70 percent of people voted for the same party at every single election of their lives. By 2025, only 34 percent say they always vote the same way. So you've got this enormous bloc of votes just — loose. Up for grabs. The combined first-preference vote for minor parties and independents has climbed from around 11 percent in 1993 to 33.6 percent in the House in 2025 — and 35.2 percent in the Senate.

Sam: So the "minor" parties, added up, aren't really minor anymore.

Alex: Here's the sentence that should stop you. 2025 was the first election in the country's history where more Australians gave their first preference to someone other than the two big parties than gave it to the Coalition. Collectively, the outsiders outpolled one of the supposed giants.

Sam: And I'm guessing this is the thing you keep circling back to — this is the ground moving, not the weather.

Alex: This is the tectonic plate. And I'd hold that image, because it's the key to the whole episode. Dealignment is the plate shifting, slowly, underneath everything. And then on top of that plate you get three faster shocks — and those are the ones that actually trigger the earthquake you feel.

Sam: Okay — so what are the three shocks sitting on top of the plate?

Alex: The loudest is immigration. Australia's net migration hit back-to-back records in 2023 — 518,000 people in one twelve-month stretch, then 548,000 — the highest intake in the country's history. And it lands right in the middle of a brutal housing shortage, with rents and prices climbing.

Sam: Now — is migration actually causing the housing crisis? Because that's the political claim, and I genuinely don't know if it's the true one.

Alex: And that's the honest, important distinction. Most economists will tell you migration's real effect on house prices is smaller than the politics makes it sound. But — and this is the thing — it became the frame. It became the story people reach for to explain why they can't afford a place to live. And One Nation owns that frame completely.

Sam: So it almost doesn't matter whether it's economically true. It's the explanation that feels true when you're getting hammered on rent every month.

Alex: That's the whole game. And on the cost-of-living piece — quick aside — we actually went deep on exactly that squeeze just a couple of weeks ago. Episode 12, "The Lucky Country Just Ran Out of Luck." If the economic backdrop under all this is what's grabbing you, that one's the companion piece. And then the fourth force is that 74 percent number from earlier — the collapse of trust. The bone-deep sense that the entire political class is self-serving and interchangeable.

Sam: And that's the force that turns a grievance into a vote for these guys specifically, isn't it. If you already believe every politician is a self-serving crook, then a party whose whole pitch is "they're all crooks and I'm the only one who isn't" doesn't sound extreme to you. It sounds like the only honest option on the ballot.

Alex: You've put your finger on the entire psychology. Distrust is what makes the anti-establishment pitch land as plain common sense instead of conspiracy. It's the gap between "I'm angry about rent" and "I'm angry about rent, and I've decided the whole system is rigged, so I'll back the one party that says so out loud." That second step is the 74 percent.

Sam: Okay, hold on, let me try to close a loop you opened way back. You said one of these four forces is different from the others. Which one — and why does it matter?

Alex: Right — and this is the thing that should genuinely change how you think about this. Two of these four forces are temporary. Cost-of-living pressure will ease eventually. Migration numbers are already falling. Those are weather — they pass. But the other two — the dealignment, and the distrust — those are structural. Decades deep. They are not going anywhere.

Sam: So even if this specific surge fades — even if One Nation itself has a shocker of a night — the demand for a party like it doesn't fade with it. The ground stays tilted.

Alex: The ground stays tilted. You can lose the party and keep the hunger. And that — hold onto that — is the single most important idea in this whole story. Which is exactly why we now have to leave Australia entirely.

Sam: Right — this is the pivot you've been promising. Because the whole time you've been describing One Nation, a little voice in my head keeps going, "this sounds like a dozen other countries."

Alex: And that voice is correct, and this is the payoff. Step all the way back from Australia, and the genuinely striking thing is how unremarkable One Nation's numbers actually look. A nativist, anti-establishment party polling 25 to 30 percent is not an Australian weird-outlier in 2026. It is the Western baseline. It's normal.

Sam: Okay. Run the list. Convince me.

Alex: Switzerland. The Swiss People's Party took 27.9 percent in 2023 — the single biggest radical-right vote share anywhere in Western Europe, and a party that's been a fixture in the Swiss government for decades. The Netherlands: Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom actually won the 2023 election outright — 23.5 percent, 37 seats out of 150 — up from under 11 percent just two years earlier.

Sam: More than doubled in two years, and won. Keep going.

Alex: Finland: the Finns Party, 20 percent in 2023, walked straight into government. Sweden: the Sweden Democrats — and this is a party with actual neo-Nazi roots in its history — took 20.5 percent in 2022, became the second-biggest party in the country, and the power behind the governing coalition. Germany: the AfD, Alternative for Germany, hit 20.8 percent in the February 2025 election. Its best result ever. Second nationally. After winning an outright plurality in the eastern state of Thuringia.

Sam: Is the Thuringia thing significant, or is it just one region?

Alex: It's significant in a way that's genuinely chilling. It was the first time a far-right party had won a German state election since 1945. Since the end of the Nazi era. That's the sentence. And then France: the National Rally took about a third of the first-round vote in the 2024 snap election. Italy is currently governed by Giorgia Meloni, whose party traces its lineage back to the post-fascist right. And Austria's Freedom Party came first for the first time in its history in 2024.

Sam: Okay. So when you line them all up like that, Australia at thirty percent doesn't look like the freak in the room. It looks like it's just... arriving late to a party everyone else is already at.

Alex: Late to the party. That's precisely it. And it's arriving for the very same reasons. Because here's what's genuinely eerie: run the diagnostic on any of these countries and you find the identical engine under the hood. The same detachment from the old parties. The same city-versus-region, degree-versus-no-degree split. The same immigration-and-cost-of-living grievance. The same collapse of trust. It is the exact four-cylinder machine we just took apart in Australia — humming away in Sweden, in the Netherlands, in the United States.

Sam: So it's not a coincidence they all rose at once. They're all running the same engine, and the engine hit the same point in the same decade.

Alex: Same engine, same decade. And there's a political scientist, Cas Mudde, who studies this, and he calls it the "fourth wave" of postwar far-right politics — a phase that kicked off around the year 2000. And his key point is that this wave isn't defined by jackboots and street violence. It's defined by mainstreaming. Normalisation. The radical right isn't the pariah at the fringe anymore. It's a normal — often dominant — item on the menu.

Sam: Which is scarier, honestly. The jackboots, at least you see coming.

Alex: The normalisation is exactly the point. Thirty years ago, voting for one of these parties felt transgressive — a bit shameful, a bit fringe. The fourth wave is what happens when that feeling just... goes away. When your neighbour votes for them, and your uncle, and it's simply a normal thing that normal people do. That's not less dangerous than the old era. In a democracy, it might be more, because it spreads by consent.

Sam: Okay, that reframes it. So it's not that the world got a rash of extremists. It's that the same vote stopped being embarrassing.

Alex: That's the wave. But Mudde draws one more distinction, and it's the hinge for everything that comes next. He says this wave arrives two completely different ways. Most of the time — the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Australia — it's a new party, grown up outside the establishment. But sometimes it doesn't build a new party at all. Sometimes it captures an old one.

Sam: Captures an old one — meaning it takes over an existing mainstream party from the inside?

Alex: Takes it over, and remakes it. Fidesz in Hungary. Law and Justice in Poland. And the biggest one of all: the Republican Party in the United States, under Donald Trump. Trump didn't found a third party. He walked into an existing one and remade it in his own image. And that distinction — new party versus captured party — is not academic trivia. It's the thing that decides where each country's story actually ends up.

Sam: Okay, so this is the part I really want, because you've now got a dozen countries, all with the same twenty-to-thirty percent far-right vote, and yet wildly different outcomes. Some are running the government, some are totally shut out. If the voters are basically the same everywhere, why on earth are the outcomes so different?

Alex: And that is the analytical heart of the whole thing. You just answered it inside the question. If the demand is roughly constant — same 25 to 30 percent, same grievances, everywhere — then the difference between countries cannot be the voters. It has to be the machinery. Go back to the gearbox. Same engine, different gearbox, four completely different destinations.

Sam: Show me the four.

Alex: Destination one: a proportional system with a culture of coalitions — the Netherlands, Finland. There, 20 percent of the vote is 20 percent of the seats, and 20 percent of the seats is a ticket into cabinet. The far right just walks straight in the front door. Destination two: a consensus system — Switzerland — where the major parties share executive power by a fixed formula. There, the Swiss People's Party has become a permanent, institutionalised part of the government. Radical and totally normalised at the same time.

Sam: Okay, that's two — and both roads lead into government, just at different speeds.

Alex: Right. Destination three is France — a two-round, majoritarian system. The National Rally can top the first round with a third of the vote, and then get strangled in the second round, because all the other parties gang up. They stand aside for each other, everyone piles in behind whoever's running against the far right, and that plurality of votes gets converted into a minority of seats. They literally call it the "republican front."

Sam: So France is doing deliberately, by teaming up in round two, roughly what Australia does automatically through preferences.

Alex: That's a sharp connection, and yes — different mechanism, identical result. Australia's compulsory-preferential system lets the major parties hoover up the preferences a fragmented protest vote sheds, and caps One Nation's seats far below its vote. France does it through tactical alliances; Australia does it through the counting machinery. Both are a gearbox converting a big vote into few seats.

Sam: And destination four is the American one — which you keep flagging like it's the scary one.

Alex: Because it's the most extreme of the lot. In a rigid two-party system like the US, there is simply no room for a new party to grow. First-past-the-post crushes third parties — a vote for a third party just splits your own side and hands the seat to your worst option, so people learn not to do it. So the radical right doesn't try to build one. It does the only thing the machinery leaves open: it takes over one of the two existing parties from the inside. And here's the bracing implication for Australia. Australia's institutions really are a genuine brake on One Nation as a party. But the American example is the reminder that, in a system hostile to new parties, the smarter and more effective move isn't to beat the establishment from the outside. It's to swallow one of its parties whole.

Sam: And you told me earlier — the firewall only holds while the two right-wing parties stay separate. So Australia's own system, the thing quietly pushing Liberal and One Nation voters into a single preference bloc, is building the on-ramp for exactly that kind of takeover.

Alex: You just closed the loop I left open. That is precisely the danger. The very machinery that caps them is also, slowly, teaching their voters to merge into one. Which brings us to the question you actually came here for.

Sam: Yeah. How does this stop? Because everyone's got a comforting story — they'll burn out, the system will contain them, someone will finally beat them. Are any of them actually true?

Alex: Every one of them has a grain of truth and a much larger deception. When you look across all these countries, history offers basically four endgames. And here's the gut-punch: every single one of them ends with the agenda still standing. Let me walk you through them.

Sam: Go.

Alex: Endgame one: co-optation. And the showcase is Denmark — this is the country people point to as the place that beat the far right. So, the facts. The Danish People's Party peaks at 21.1 percent in 2015. Second-biggest party in the country. By the 2022 election, they've collapsed to 2.6 percent. Almost wiped off the map.

Sam: Okay — 21 down to under 3. That's the dream scenario, right? That's the "we actually beat them" story. So why do you look like you're about to ruin it for me.

Alex: Because look at how they did it. The centre-left party — the Social Democrats, under Mette Frederiksen — systematically adopted the far-right party's entire hardline immigration platform. A cap on non-Western arrivals. Confiscating asylum seekers' valuables. An explicit "zero refugees" ambition. They took the whole programme and made it their own, until there was no daylight left between them and the far right on the one issue that far-right party existed for.

Sam: Oh. Oh, that's — so the voters got offered the exact same policy, but from a respectable, mainstream brand.

Alex: And they took it. Why wouldn't they? The party died. But its programme became the law of the land, and the consensus of the mainstream. So think about what actually happened there. That is not a defeat of the far right. That is the most complete victory it has ever won. They destroyed the vehicle, and arrived at the destination anyway.

Sam: That genuinely reframes the whole thing. Everybody holds Denmark up as the win, and the "win" was the mainstream swallowing the entire agenda. Okay. That's one. What are the other three?

Alex: Endgame two: normalisation in government. Italy, Switzerland — the far right just becomes part of the furniture. Switzerland's the wild version of this: the Swiss People's Party sits in the cabinet by formula, year after year, radical positions and all, and nobody blinks anymore. And Meloni governs Italy competently enough that the "post-fascist" label just quietly stops carrying a charge.

Sam: So endgame two isn't a defeat at all. It's the far right winning so completely that it becomes boring.

Alex: Winning by becoming boring. That's endgame two in a sentence. Endgame three is the hopeful one — the cost of governing. The idea that once they actually get power and have to make real choices, they disappoint their own voters and shrink. And there's genuine evidence for this one — the freshest example is the Netherlands.

Sam: The Wilders party — the one that won.

Alex: The one that won. They win in 2023, they get into government in 2024, and then Wilders can't deliver the "strictest asylum crackdown ever" fast enough — so in June 2025, he blows up his own coalition. Detonates it. And at the snap election that October, his party falls back — gets dragged into a dead heat, 26 seats each, with a liberal, pro-European party — and everyone else refuses to govern with him. The far right got its hands on the wheel, and couldn't drive.

Sam: Okay, so that one actually is a bit hopeful. They flew too close to the sun and melted.

Alex: A bit — but read the fine print, because even here, the agenda didn't recede when the party did. And there's a pattern underneath it. The junior far-right partners — the ones propping up somebody else's government — tend to get punished. But the far-right leaders, the ones actually running the show, someone like Meloni, mostly hold or grow their support.

Sam: So even the "they'll fail in power" hope has an asterisk. It mostly comes true for the sidekicks, not the stars.

Alex: For the sidekicks, not the stars. And that's not a small asterisk — it means the leaders who matter most are exactly the ones the curse doesn't touch.

Sam: So there's a cruel little asymmetry in there. If you're the tail wagging someone else's dog, you get the blame and none of the credit. But if you're the dog — if you're Meloni, running Italy — you can actually consolidate.

Alex: Exactly the asymmetry. Being the tail gets you punished. Being the dog does not. Which is one more reason the "they'll just collapse in power" hope is thinner than people want it to be — it mostly applies to the juniors, not the leaders. And then endgame four is the one Australians should recognise from their own history: the party simply self-destructs. One Nation already did it once, imploding between 1998 and 2004 in a mess of egos and lawsuits. Britain's UKIP did it after the Brexit vote — it achieved its one goal and just evaporated.

Sam: Huh — so UKIP basically won itself out of existence. It got Brexit, and then had no reason to exist anymore.

Alex: Won itself to death. Which sounds like a happy ending, right up until you remember that Brexit actually happened, and it's permanent. The party evaporated; the outcome stayed. Same shape as Denmark, just faster — kill the vehicle, and the destination is still standing there.

Sam: So let me try to say the uncomfortable thing out loud, because I think it's the whole point. There are, what, four or five different ways to kill the party. And not one reliable way to kill the thing the voters actually want.

Alex: That's the thread through all four — and it's the uncomfortable heart of the whole thing. Beat them by stealing their policies, and you've enacted their programme. Beat them in government, and their ideas stay mainstream. Beat them by waiting for them to fracture, and a fresh vehicle just rises out of the very same ground. The far right, as a party, is mortal — you can kill it half a dozen ways. The far right, as an agenda, has proven very, very hard to stop.

Sam: Okay. So put it all together for Australia specifically. Given everything — the surge, the system, the international pattern — where does this actually go? Give me the honest forecast. Not the scary version, and not the comforting one.

Alex: So let's be disciplined about it. Start with the least likely outcome — and it's the one the headlines imply: a One Nation government. That is genuinely improbable. The preferential system is a real barrier — remember, thirty percent of primaries still only bought them two seats. They trail badly on the two-party count. And their own history shows how fast a polling lead between elections can just evaporate on the actual day.

Sam: And has that actually happened before — a big lead between elections that melts when it counts?

Alex: It has. It's a real part of their story: riding high in the polls between elections, then falling back once people are standing in the booth with a ballot in their hand. Polls are cheap; a vote is a commitment. So there's a genuine chance a chunk of this thirty percent is a protest that softens on the day. That's the optimist's case, and it's not nothing.

Sam: And there's a Hanson-specific risk in there too, isn't there. It's very much her party.

Alex: Very much, and that's a real vulnerability. In mid-2026 she made some remarks about "monoculturalism" at the National Press Club, and the party dropped five and a half points off the back of it. One gaffe. She's in her seventies now, there's no obvious successor. A party that leader-dependent, polling that high, is fragile in a way the topline number completely hides.

Sam: Okay. So not a One Nation government. Then what are the realistic roads?

Alex: Two of them — and they're the two the rest of the West has already walked. Road one is the European road: One Nation consolidates as a permanent bloc holding the balance of power in the Senate — where, remember, proportional representation actually rewards its vote — and it forces whichever major party governs to bargain with it, and drift onto its ground, issue by issue.

Sam: So they never quite run the country, but they're permanently sitting in the Senate with a hand on the tap.

Alex: A hand on the tap, permanently. That's the European road. And that Senate base isn't hypothetical — it's literally where the whole comeback started. The 2016 double-dissolution, the four senators. The Senate is the proportional chamber, so it's the one place the gearbox already works in their favour.

Sam: So the House keeps them out, and the Senate lets them in. Same Parliament, two opposite gearboxes.

Alex: Two opposite gearboxes in one building — and that split is probably their long-term shape. Road two is the American road: the Coalition, terrified of bleeding any more voters directly to One Nation, just — absorbs it. A merger, or a takeover, that turns the mainstream conservative party into the vehicle. The way the Republicans became the party of Trump.

Sam: And which road they go down depends on what?

Alex: The single biggest variable is the Liberal Party's own crisis. And this is why South Australia matters so much beyond South Australia. When your major conservative party finishes behind One Nation and crashes to five seats — that humiliation is exactly the kind of shock that starts a realignment. It's the moment a party looks at the insurgent on its right and has to ask: do we fight them, or do we become them?

Sam: So what would actually tell us which way it's breaking? If you're listening to this at home, what's the tell to watch for?

Alex: Good question to end on. What would prove this whole forecast wrong is a real cost-of-living recovery, plus migration falling sharply, plus a credible Coalition leader who wins those voters back before the realignment locks in — basically the Danish playbook, run by the Australian centre-right. What would confirm it is another One Nation result at a real election that matches these polls — or a formal Liberal–One Nation accommodation.

Sam: But here's what's genuinely doing my head in. Both of those roads — the "it stops" one and the "it grows" one — they end up in the same place, don't they.

Alex: They end in the exact same place on policy. And that's the rabbit hole at the bottom of this rabbit hole. If One Nation keeps rising, its agenda governs directly. If it gets beaten the Danish way, its agenda governs anyway — just wearing a respectable badge. The far right in Australia may or may not ever win the seats. But on the evidence of every comparable democracy, it has already mostly won the argument.

Sam: Okay. That is a lot of ground. Can we land the plane — what are the two or three things I should actually walk away holding?

Alex: Let's do it. Thing one: the speed is real, but the story isn't Australian, and it isn't really about Hanson. One Nation topping the polls is the local edition of the defining political story of the age — the slow collapse of the two-party order right across the democratic West, and the radical right ri…