Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern takes the historical win
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was widely expected to win a second term, buoyed by the compassionate and yet decisive leadership style under the crisis brought by the pandemic this year. Ardern’s performance beat pre-election opinion polls and put Labor on course for its strongest showing since 1946. And the guesses came true because on Saturday (17 Oct), Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern delivered the biggest election victory for her center-left Labor Party in half a century as voters rewarded her for a decisive response to COVID-19. This was leveraging success battling the pandemic to gain an unprecedented outright majority and the chance to implement her reform agenda.
Party president Claire Szabo praised the campaign of the charismatic leader, who sparked a wave of support dubbed “Jacinda-mania” when she took over the party in 2017 as it was languishing in the polls.
Since New Zealand adopted a proportional voting system in 1996, no leader has achieved an absolute majority leading to a succession of multi-party governments; which makes this win a historic day in the history of New Zealand. “This is a historic shift,” said political commentator Bryce Edwards of Victoria University in Wellington, describing the vote as one of the biggest swings in New Zealand’s electoral history in 80 years.
Ardern thanked New Zealanders for delivering the landslide victory. “Thank you to the many people who gave us their vote, who trusted us to continue leading New Zealand’s recovery,” she told cheering supporters, adding that her center-left Labor Party had seen its highest level of support in at least 50 years.
With 87% of the vote counted, Ardern’s Labor Party had 49% support — heading to its biggest share of the vote since the 1930s — after a huge swing to the left in many urban and provincial electorates. The opposition National Party slumped to 27%, its worst showing since 2002.
“Congratulations on your result because it is, I believe, an outstanding result for the Labor Party. It has been a tough campaign,” Collins told cheering supporters in Auckland. While the count has not been finalised, the figures were enough for opposition leader Judith Collins to concede after phoning Ardern.
Ardern had dubbed the vote “the Covid election” and campaigned on her government’s success in eliminating community transmission of the virus, which has caused just 25 deaths in a population of five million. The pandemic is just one of a string of crises that showed Ardern’s leadership qualities during a torrid first term.
“It is hard to see an election outcome which does not return Jacinda Ardern as Prime Minister,” said former Prime Minister Helen Clark and co-chair of a World Health Organization (WHO) panel looking at the global coronavirus response. “There’s no doubt the strong, great leadership we’ve had from Jacinda Ardern has been a massive factor in all this,” she shared.
By Karishma Gwalani
