SA Socialists achieved a solid result in its first election since the party formed in May 2025 as part of the nationwide expansion of the Victorian Socialists project.
The party ran two candidates—Ahmed Azhar in the seat of Croydon and Leila Clendon in Enfield, both in Adelaide’s northern suburbs. Due to electoral regulations requiring a party to be registered a minimum of eight months before an election for it to run candidates in its name, both candidates were listed on the ballot as independents. On all campaign materials, however, they were advertised as endorsed by SA Socialists.
At the time of writing, the first preference vote stands at 6.5 percent for Azhar in Croydon and 5.6 percent for Clendon in Enfield. This included some stand-out booth results, including over 13 percent at Enfield Primary School and Blair Athol North in Enfield, and 12.7 percent at Brompton and 10.3 percent at Kilburn in Croydon.
These results were built on a grassroots campaign that doorknocked 7,000 households, letterboxed all 42,000 homes across the two electorates and mobilised more than 150 volunteers.
Both seats are Labor Party strongholds. The current two-party preferred count in Croydon is 80 percent to Labor Premier Peter Malinauskus and 20 percent to One Nation, while in Enfield it’s 71.5 percent to Labor and 28.5 to One Nation. These kinds of comfortable margins mean the seats are taken for granted by the party, which was particularly the case in this election, when Labor's focus was on pushing the Liberals out of their remaining urban seats in wealthier eastern and beachside suburbs.
Croydon and Enfield are diverse, working-class districts shaped by successive waves of migration, with thriving Hazara (a Persian-speaking ethnic group primarily from Afghanistan), South Asian, Vietnamese and southern European communities alongside public and community housing tenants, and newer apartment developments drawing in younger workers and professionals.
SA Socialists found a genuine audience for class politics across both electorates and among a wide range of demographics including young share houses, older lefties who haven’t had a political home in decades and people who recognised our candidates from protests and social movements. On cost of living, the argument that cut through was straightforward: whenever there's a crisis, it's always the poor and the working class who pay the cost, and SA Socialists think the super-rich should pay instead.
In Kilburn and Blair Athol North—centres of the Hazara community—anger at Labor’s record on Palestine and its support for Trump’s war in Iran also won people to voting socialist. The party’s ability to make its case in these and some other areas was helped by the relative absence of volunteers for the Greens, due to that party’s decision to concentrate resources in the wealthier and historically Liberal seat of Heysen, which it believed it was in with an (outside) chance of winning. Concerns about the rise of One Nation also helped make the case for a genuine left alternative that’s prepared to make a clear stand against racism.
In Brompton, where the Greens had previously polled over 20 percent and where SA Socialists volunteers were directly competing with them for votes, the argument that went furthest was strategic and structural: that capitalism is the root cause of the problems people face, and what’s needed is an openly socialist and unequivocally anti-capitalist political movement. Something that appealed to many left-wing voters was the fact that SA Socialists isn’t just an electoral project but is committed to rebuilding working-class power through the unions and social movements too.
The votes are still being counted, but SA Socialists’ results in this election demonstrate the viability of the Socialist Party project outside Victoria and lay a solid foundation for the party’s future in South Australia.
