Melbourne, Australia — The political fault lines are familiar to any democracy. At election time, the people divide according to location. Those living in coastal cities tend to vote center-left; those in the hinterland are likely to vote conservative. The pattern repeats by age, education and ethnicity. The university graduate and the migrant lean center-left; the retiree and the local-born lean conservative.

The twist in Australia is that these social and economic forces are shaking out in favor of the Labor Party, not the conservative Liberal Party. Australia is decidedly more urbanized and more cosmopolitan than the United States, Britain or continental Europe. This essential difference in cultural makeup has allowed Australia to resist the wealthy world’s lurch to the populist right.

It would have been unthinkable to make this call just a few years ago. Between November 2010 and September 2013, the Liberal Party and its rural-based coalition partner, the National Party, won six of the seven elections held across the country, at the federal, state and territory levels. It was a stunning sequence of successes for the center-right with no precedent in Australian political history.