Australia is in general election mode. This Saturday, some 17 million citizens will have to vote - it is mandatory under penalty of economic sanction - between the worn-out acting prime minister, the conservative Scott Morrison, and the leader of the Labor opposition, Anthony Albanese.
After an intense campaign marked by the increase in the cost of living, the fight against climate change or the difficult relations with China, the polls for now give a slight advantage to the second, although nothing has been decided yet.
The current premier, Scott Morrison, is a political survivor who plans to stand up to the last moment. He already did it in the 2019 elections, when he retained the power he had achieved a year earlier despite having all the polls against him.
"I have always believed in miracles," he said upon learning of his victory. Since then, he has become the first leader to complete a full term - in Australia it is three years - since the days of John Howard (1996-2007).
At the head of the conservative liberal-national coalition, Morrison has based his campaign on the "strength" of the Australian economy - GDP is expected to grow by 4.2% this year and unemployment will fall to 3.5% - and his pandemic management.
Thanks to its initial policy of zero tolerance and the closure of borders, his country managed to keep the number of infections and deaths at bay and suffer a brief recession that was soon overcome and then bet on recovering normality and opening up again to the movement of people.
However, against him plays an inflation of 5.1%, the highest in two decades, and the spectacular increase in the cost of fuel, food or mortgages, affected by the recent rise in interest rates.
According to the Australian Automobile Association, the price of a liter of petrol has increased by 40% in the last year. Meanwhile, the value of an average home in large cities such as Sydney or Melbourne exceeds one million Australian dollars (more than 660,000 euros at the exchange rate), which makes them inaccessible to the vast majority.
And in some parts of the country, now they must spend twice as much to fill the shopping basket. "With Scott Morrison, real wages plummet while the cost of living skyrockets," Albanese criticized this week from the capital, Canberra.
Morrison's personal image has also suffered greatly from his controversial management at key moments. His leadership style, rude and direct, sometimes does not like even his own. "He is an autocrat and a thug without a moral compass," a senator of the same formation snapped at them in March.
In 2019, he had to publicly apologize for going on a family vacation to Hawaii while the country went up in flames. He also criticized his passivity when it became known that an advisor to his party reported having been raped by a former colleague in Parliament. Her case caused numerous mobilizations and a notorious internal investigation, which established that one in three workers of the institution has suffered abuse.
Other issues that have marked the campaign are the fight against climate change -the country is one of the biggest polluters in the world- or the difficult relationship they maintain with China, their main trading partner, with whom they continue to chain disputes. Canberra is wary of Beijing's growing power in the Indo-Pacific region, its traditional zone of influence.
In recent times, the Asian giant has managed to get small island states to modify their foreign policy to leave Taiwan aside in their favor; or the signing of an opaque security agreement with the Solomon Islands, which in April set off alarms about the possibility of increasing its military presence in the area.
In response, Morrison has strengthened its alliance with the United States by signing the AUKUS defense pact -which will provide it with nuclear submarines- or revitalizing the informal alliance called QUAD together with Tokyo, New Delhi and Washington.
During the campaign, he has raised the tone against the Asian giant, accusing it of "economic coercion" with its neighbors and emphasizing its credentials to defend national interests and its internal security.
For their part, although they agree substantially, Labor is committed to giving a new focus to the strategic relationship. "We can't change China or the way it chooses to engage with us, but what we can do is focus on building the kind of region we want," Penny Wong, a Labor foreign spokeswoman, said last week.
The tight result predicted by the polls opens up the possibility of a minority government, since neither of the two main political forces would win 76 of the 151 seats in the Legislature in contention. For this reason, smaller formations such as the Green Party - which already has a deputy and aspires to more - or other independent candidates could be key when it comes to formalizing potential government alliances.
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