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Former Australian Leader's Rebound Raises Speculation of His Return to Power

CANBERRA — One year ago this month, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, his eyes brimming with tears and his poll numbers in the dirt, stood on the steps of Parliament and announced his resignation. No Australian prime minister had ever been ousted by his party during his first term in office — an Icarus-like fall from grace for a man who had, just months earlier, held the highest-ever approval rating for a sitting Australian head of government.

What a difference a year can make.

Fresh off his prominent role in securing robust international action against the forces of the Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi, Mr. Rudd, who is now foreign minister, is consistently polling as the most popular political leader in the country. His signature legislation — an emissions trading program to tackle climate change — is at the top of the government’s agenda, and his smiling visage and distinctive mop of gray hair are ubiquitous in the news media.

Mr. Rudd’s popularity bump — coupled with a sense among many that his successor, Julia Gillard, has done a lackluster job in his stead — has created a wave of speculation about his intentions. The question making the rounds here in the capital and on the airwaves would have been unthinkable just a few months ago: Could lightning strike twice?

During a wide-ranging interview last week in his offices in Parliament, Mr. Rudd dodged and parried attempts to draw him out on whether he intended to pursue the leadership role again. While he insisted that he was not actively seeking a return to the premiership, he repeatedly refused to rule out the possibility in the future.

“I’m very happy being foreign minister of Australia,” he said with a grin as he leaned back in his chair. “It’s a great job, and I really like working with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. We’re good pals.” He added, “And I have no plans whatsoever for a higher office.”

But this is not the first time Mr. Rudd has made such a denial, and it seems no likelier than his previous repudiations to quiet the rumor mill. Conversation in the capital can take on Shakespearean overtones when his name is mentioned — one observer likened him to a ghost whose political murder has come back to haunt Parliament.

“It would kill you and I and my dogs, what he went through, but Kevin’s not normal,” said a Labor insider and close friend of Mr. Rudd’s who requested anonymity in order to speak openly.

Kevin Rudd was born in the small country town of Nambour in rural Queensland State in 1957, the son of a farmer and a nurse. By many accounts he had a difficult childhood, marked by bullying and the early death of his father. Singled out by professors and peers for his sharp mind, he mastered Mandarin in college, a skill that helped shape his Sino-centric view of the 21st century.

(Above his desk hangs a monograph of four Chinese characters drawn in calligraphy. Their Australian translation: “Don’t mess with me,” Mr. Rudd said with a laugh, though he used a saltier epithet than “mess.”)

After less than a decade in Parliament, the fresh-faced Mr. Rudd swept into power in 2007 with a victory over Prime Minister John Howard’s fatigued Liberal (Australian for conservative) government, which had worn out its welcome after 11 years in power.

Yet even as he remained enormously popular with the electorate for much of his first two years in office, Mr. Rudd — whose leadership style was often described as autocratic and shaped by an unbending confidence in his own intellect — had been clashing with his caucus for years. Observers spoke of an almost supernatural ability to alienate his allies.

“One of his ministers said to me that ‘I’ve never loathed anyone so much in my whole life,”’ said Phillip Coorey, chief political correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald.

Mr. Rudd nevertheless won the leadership because Labor wanted to win, Mr. Coorey said, and many in the party felt they could only do it by tapping his popularity. So, when a series of policy stumbles surrounding the emissions trading program and a proposed “super-tax” on the profits of Australia’s hugely influential mining concerns drove down his poll numbers in 2009, the knives were quick to come out. One night the people of Australia went to sleep with one government, and in the morning they awoke with another.

The minister who said he loathed Mr. Rudd “just joined the stampede because he couldn’t stand the guy,” according to Mr. Coorey. “I think he was shocked by the depth of his feelings for the guy because he wasn’t, you know, a hater.”

Publicly, Mr. Rudd dismisses the personal impact of the ouster, but more than one person close to him said that losing the premiership so unexpectedly after a lifetime of striving for it was devastating.

“Look at the Tutus of this world and what they’ve been through. Look at the Mandelas of this world and what they’ve been through,” Mr. Rudd said — before mentioning that Archbishop Desmond Tutu himself had, in fact, called the previous evening to check in on him. “What we go through is kind of a bagatelle by contrast.”

If that is true, he may want to convey it to Ms. Gillard, who, plagued by a reputation for disloyalty, a wooden speaking style and an intransigent opposition, finds herself in territory that would look remarkably familiar to Mr. Rudd.

Her approval rating hit an all-time low of 43 percent in the most recent Nielsen opinion poll, while her disapproval rating was up two points to 52 percent. That gives her a net approval of minus nine, her lowest numbers since becoming prime minister. At the same time, a recent poll by Newspoll, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, found that 36 percent of voters said Mr. Rudd was their preferred choice for Labor leader, putting him ahead of Ms. Gillard at 29 percent, a lead he has held since at least February, according to the poll.

Mr. Rudd’s numbers have risen partly on the back of the role he played in the Libya intervention earlier this year. He said he was tasked with securing the crucial backing of the Arab League, whose support for military action gave NATO the regional cover it needed to use force in another Muslim country, during an intense round of shuttle diplomacy.

Mr. Rudd said that he was implementing a Libya policy already agreed upon by his boss. But at the time, tensions over the issue ran so high that one of Ms. Gillard’s staff members accused him in a media leak of “going rogue.” Instead, he ended up looking decisive and principled to the public at a moment when those qualities were seen as lacking in both parties’ leaders, said Mr. Coorey, the journalist.

Although evidence points to Mr. Rudd remaining highly unpopular within the small world of Labor Party kingmakers, it is no longer unthinkable that the party could return to the calculus that put him in power in the first place, said John Wanna, a professor of political science at Australian National University in Canberra.

“If they were absolutely convinced they could win with him, I think there might be some who would think about it if the circumstances got very dire. Remember, they did bring John Howard back in the Liberal Party,” he said.

For now, however, Mr. Rudd says that he ignores the polls — as hard as it is to imagine that someone as driven as he is could do so.

“I’m still on the stage of politics, I’m not in some Brechtian sense self observing. To sustain the analogy, we are the dramatis personae. We are in it, we are not the audience,” he said.

“The audience makes these judgments — it’s the people in our democracies, for good or for ill. What’s important for me is to sustain your moral compass about what the hell you’re here to do and why.”

A version of this article appears in print on   in The International Herald Tribune. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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