AFTER an intense five-week campaign, the polls have closed in Australia's federal parliamentary election. If opinion-poll predictions are borne out, the election will see the defeat of the prime minister, Kevin Rudd, and his centre-left Labor government. In the lead according to most pollsters is a conservative Liberal-National coalition, headed by Tony Abbott (pictured). The election comes after six years of Labor rule marked by some of the most dramatic upheavals in Australia’s political history. Labor steered the economy through the global financial crisis, putting Australia now into its 22nd year of uninterrupted growth; unemployment is 5.7%. Labor’s management of its own affairs, by contrast, was turbulent.

Since Mr Rudd led Labor to power in 2007 there have been two changes of party leader and prime minister. After Mr Rudd lost his parliamentary colleagues’ confidence, they replaced him with Julia Gillard, his deputy, in 2010. In June they decided to ditch Ms Gillard and reinstall Mr Rudd. At first, there were signs that his earlier popularity with voters might rescue Labor from the dire opinion-poll ratings it suffered under Ms Gillard. By the campaign’s final week, though, it seemed that Mr Rudd’s old magic had worn off. The final polls gave Mr Abbott’s coalition a winning margin of between 6% and 8%, after the distribution of second-preference votes.

Mr Abbott’s pugnacious parliamentary performances, and unpopularity with women voters, once marked him out as perhaps the conservative Liberal party’s least-likely future leader, let alone a prime minister. He seized the party’s leadership in late 2009, overthrowing Malcolm Turnbull, who had given the Liberals’ parliamentary support to the Rudd government’s plan for an emissions-trading scheme to fight climate change. Mr Abbott has since ditched support for market-based mechanisms on climate policy. If he wins the election he is likely to pursue a populist approach, similar to that of the previous Liberal government headed by John Howard, one of Mr Abbott’s biggest champions.

Mr Abbott has given few details on many policies. Instead, he has highlighted Labor’s disunity and called on voters not to endorse “another three years like the last six”. His remarkably disciplined and gaffe-free campaign stumbled on September 5th. In a radio interview Mr Turnbull, now the coalition’s communications spokesman, explained an apparent new policy to protect children from internet pornography. It would oblige smartphone operators and internet service providers (ISPs) to install filters to block “adult content”; users could have the filters deactivated if they contacted their ISPs. Hours later, Mr Turnbull declared that it was not the coalition’s policy at all. He said the coalition’s campaign headquarters had mistakenly published it, and he had seen it only shortly before the interview. Mr Abbott admitted that he, too, had only skimmed the policy. He blamed “quality control” for its mistaken publication. Mr Rudd called it a “debacle”.

Despite the omens, Mr Rudd doggedly maintains that the election outcome may hold “a few surprises”. The campaign has certainly notched up a few firsts. A record number of 1,717 candidates are standing. Australia is one of the few countries where voting is compulsory. The electoral commission says about 3m voters—roughly one in five—cast their votes early, before polling booths opened at 8am on Saturday. This too is a record.

If the voices of Australia’s most influential newspapers decided the outcome, Mr Abbott would win handsomely. The two-thirds of Australia’s big city newspapers that Rupert Murdoch controls have waged a relentless campaign against Mr Rudd. Only the Age, of Melbourne (owned by the rival Fairfax group), endorsed Mr Rudd. On September 6th the newspaper acknowledged Australians’ weariness with Labor’s infighting. But it praised as “visionary, forward-thinking and nation-building” three key Labor ventures: building a fibre-optic broadband network across the country, boosting education spending and the introduction of a carbon-pricing policy. The Age concluded that the coalition’s campaign consisted more of “fatuous and hollow sloganeering” and “gimmicks devised to meet a three-year election cycle”. Saturday’s poll will show whether those “gimmicks” did the trick.