Dr Oliver Hartwich: On borrowed calm

Across the Tasman, anger has propelled Pauline Hanson’s One Nation from a fringe outfit to the most popular party, on 31 percent in a recent poll, ahead of both Labor and the Coalition. Yet Australia’s preferential voting, which redistributes losing candidates’ votes, could still return a Labor government.

The same anger is loose across the democratic world, the product of a decade of crises that squeezed household budgets and loosened party loyalties. What it does to each country’s politics depends partly on how votes are counted.