If 2024 was the year of global elections, 2025 is the year voters want experimentation in politics and government – and they’re willing to elect risky people to deliver it.

2024 set a clear pattern: incumbent governments were punished by being chronically weakened or kicked out.  Those that held on did so either with radically reduced majorities or, more often, through shaky deals between parties with little in common except keeping political insurgents out.

There are lessons for Australian politicians as our own federal election looms. A big one is that pretending more of the same politics and policy is transformational is likely to turn voters off and make them look for alternatives. Voters want something different to a rewarmed Canberra consensus (served with or without nuclear reactors) – even if they don’t quite know what that ‘different’ looks like.

Argentina’s October 2023 presidential election was the canary in the coalmine for politics across the democratic world.

Finance Minister Sergio Massa was the ruling party’s candidate, running against a far right populist, Javier Milei. Massa was offering continuity to the Argentinian people, which didn’t go down well in a troubled country with inflation at over 120% per annum and interest rates at 111% per annum. They elected Milei, who describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist and former tantric sex coach, who campaigned with a chainsaw and is advised by four cloned dogs named after dead economists.

Milei promised to use the chainsaw to shrink government. He appointed economist Federico Sturzenegger, as his deregulation czar. Sturzenegger has identified more than 4,000 laws and 70,000 decrees that discourage investment and entrepreneurship and damage productivity.

The results so far are mixed. Inflation seemed to peak at 292% in April and has fallen ever since.  Interest rates peaked in December 2023 at 126% pa and have also fallen every month since, to 32% pa. Government jobs have been slashed and inflation has caused real cuts in social security programs. 

Despite the pain, President Milei ended his first year more trusted than his three predecessors, with public approval of around 50%. Overall, Argentines feel more optimistic about the economy and more confident under Milei’s government. 

There are parallels to Donald Trump’s return to power. Milei’s main appeal to voters was that he would end ‘business as usual’ politics and government that Argentinians were increasingly unhappy with by upending the consensus on ‘the right things to do’ in power.  Trump’s drain the swamp agenda and promise to fight America’s ‘enemies within’ sounds very similar. 

Milei has his cloned dogs and deregulation czar. Donald Trump has his cost cutting Elon Musk, a former World Wrestling Executive as Education Secretary, and a Fox News TV host as Defense Secretary nominee.  That sends a shake up shockwave into Washington.

People in both countries have thought things weren’t going in the right direction. They don’t want leaders who’ll just turn the handle on familiar, failing, policies and programs embraced by professional politicians, bureaucrats and incumbent party organisations. Instead, Argentinians and Americans voters have both opted for someone from out of town who’s told them they’ll break the status quo.

The lesson? People are voting for change, even when they don’t know what that change will be. They’re licencing experimentation and ideas that jar badly with received wisdom and policy continuity.  And they’re willing to accept a lot of heat, light, noise, froth and bubble as the price.

The Argentinians are also showing they will accept a level of economic pain and insecurity to get structural changes made.   Whether that lasts long – and whether such pain tolerance exists in America – is something we can’t know yet.

Countries that held elections without such disruptive outcomes fall into two broad buckets.  There’s the UK bucket, where the incumbent Tory party lost badly to Labour’s Keir Starmer. But Starmer’s been struggling every day since the July election. His personal approval rating fell 49 points to -38% in three months. His policy-light election strategy has led to a government that seems more like the Tories than something new. That is making voters unhappy fast.  They’re wondering why the hell they voted for Starmer just to get the same thing in a different wrapper.

Then there’s France and Germany: both governments are desperately trying to keep populists out of government, but they’re losing ground every time there’s a vote.

Macron’s term as president lasts until April 2027, but Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has the momentum. She’s stronger outside any of the temporary coalitions Macron is orchestrating. Government disarray only reinforces to voters how much they want something different.

In Germany, Olaf Scholz lost a vote of confidence and called fresh elections. His ruling coalition has been watching the rise in support for the far right Alternative for Deutschland party with alarm.

Both Germany and France have tried to swim against the tide of dissatisfaction with the usual flavours of business as usual politics.  And both seem to show that this only puts off the hour of change.  A Milei or Trump-like  figure can ignite popular dissatisfaction and give a chainsaw-wielding change maker the licence to experiment. In France, maybe that’s Le Pen or her popular protégé Jordan Bardella.

In Germany, coalition numbers games may still have some time to play out. But the AfD’s rise looks set to continue because mainstream parties don’t have solutions to Germany’s pressing problems.

In Australia, there’s similar growing dissatisfaction with the way our own politics and parties are working, but little evidence of excitement about the prospect of a returned Albanese government or a new Dutton-led one.

In December polling, Dutton beat Albanese in 10 of 12 leadership attributes, including on who had a clear vision for the country. But both leaders have personal approval ratings that are underwater (Dutton -3 and Albanese -17). That shows voters want something different to what’s on offer. An international perspective says this isn’t just about personality – it’s about policy substance and basic directions.

Treasurer Chalmers’ mid year budget update tells us why: growth is weak, government spending and debt keep going up without revenue to fund them. Meanwhile houses are unaffordable unless you already own one and Australians’ per capita incomes are falling for the first time in decades. No wonder voters here, like many in other places, want deeper change to good ol’business as usual major party bickering and Treasury-led tweaks – even if they can’t say exactly what that change looks like.

So, internationally, 2025 is shaping to be the year of licence and experimentation in politics, where the unthinkable can not just be thought, it can be said and done.

By May, we’ll see whether any Australian political leader seeks that licence to shake things up or takes the UK’s Starmer road of radically underwhelming continuity. Maybe some of us are more Argentinian than we thought.

This article was first published in the Financial Review.