Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announces the support of Tasmanian Independent lawmaker Andrew Wilkie in her bid to form a minority government, Thursday in Canberra, Australia.

Canberra, Australia ? Whether or not she emerges as winner following recent elections, Australia’s first woman prime minister will have led the nation’s oldest political party to one of the lowest points in its 119-year history.

Julia Gillard, a sharp-witted and plain-speaking former lawyer, had been widely expected to take her center-left Labor Party to victory with a loss of some seats at Aug. 21 elections. History was on her side since no Australian government had been denied a second three-year term since 1931.

But she failed to convince sufficient voters that her government deserved a second chance. She now needs to persuade at least two of three independent lawmakers next week to support Labor in a minority government commanding 76 or 77 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott, whose Liberal Party represents the conservative spectrum in Australian politics, needs the support of all three independents to achieve a majority in parliament’s lower chamber where parties form government.

The question of how Labor came to land on this knife-edge only months after the party held a seemingly unassailable lead in opinion polls for almost four years has divided analysts, as well as angry government lawmakers.

Nick Economou, a Monash University political scientist, said Friday the similarities between the single-term Labor government that fell in 1931 and Gillard’s extend beyond a shared background of global recession.

Economou says both administrations’ fatal flaw was internal division. In 1931, the party was fractured over economic policy in response to the Great Depression.

This time the chasm was created with a sudden decision by party power-brokers to replace Prime Minister Kevin Rudd with Gillard, his deputy, in an internal party mutiny in June.

“To take out your leader quite the way they did, that’s really taking a very high political risk and I reckon it was going to be a struggle for whoever led Labor in those circumstances to contain the damage,” said Economou.

Anger at Rudd’s demise became apparent during the election campaign when apparently well-placed, unnamed government sources leaked to the media that Gillard had failed as prime minister to attend top-level national security meetings.

As a minister in Rudd’s Cabinet, the leakers also accused her of callously arguing against increasing pensions because old people were more likely to vote for a conservative party rather than Labor. The retribution continued at the ballot box with Labor suffering its worst losses in Rudd’s home state of Queensland.