Someone wanna wrap up this NZ news for me in a couple of sentences?
No party can form government in their own right, or with the aid of natural allies. Government will be formed by whoever is willing to accede to the demands of Winston Peters and his party New Zealand First, who are populists but lack a good Australian analogue.
To elaborate: National fall one seat short even with libertarian ACT on side, and once specials are counted they will probably be 2-3 seats short. Labour/Greens fall six seats short, and with specials might get closer. NZ First play the anti-immigrant card like One Nation or Lambie and they get the old racist vote but Winnie is Māori. He started out a National MP but left the party decades ago and has been a coalition partner with both National and Labour governments in the past, to the point he was Deputy PM under one deal. He will almost certainly get that role again no matter who he supports. He's more socially conservative than liberal, but it's very difficult to put a label on him because Winston really just looks out for Winston.
And to think that in 2011 Winnie's career looked over. He is the ultimate political survivor.
I hesitate to butt my nose in where it don't belong, but how soft was a polling surge that happened because an old washed up party leader was swapped a couple weeks in for a youngish dynamic looking party leader? Pretty soft, in all likelihood? Had Labour changed anything much else, on a fundamental level?
So maybe this is the victory before the victory, that you were talking about before. You know, the victory that the winner lives to regret.
The Labour vote has rebounded over 10%, so it's pretty impressive a recovery even if they don't form government - but the question does arise whether most of that was ultimately at the expense of the Greens. How many people came across from the other side of politics? It looks like very few left the Nats.
The problem two months ago wasn't so much the Labour platform, but that the previous leader was painfully unpopular with the general public and the party couldn't figure out how to market itself. Jacinda gave them likeability.
It's just so difficult to believe that a party presiding over a country's downward spiral (this would be accurate, no?) could still get reelected. Best case scenario this is a repeat of the UK election, but even I'm shocked that May's held up for 3 months.
Well the thing is that New Zealand doesn't see itself as in a downward spiral, at least not if you're Pākehā. The Key-English government has overseen economic growth after the GFC and many Pākehā New Zealanders feel they live in a stable, prosperous country and struggle to relate to the plight of the less fortunate. I could list off all the problems with that, but Labour can't really run on a "look how much these guys have fucked up" platform because the swing voters they need to pinch from the Nats by and large don't think the current mob have fucked up. Hence, Jacinda's "relentlessly positive" angle.
