New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has secured a second term in office following an election on Saturday that saw her liberal centre-left Labour Party walk away from the polls with a history-making landslide victory.
Vote tallying from the elections show that the Labour Party won the polls with 49% of the vote in comparison to 27% recorded by its main challenger, the conservative National Party. Early projections had placed the Labour Party as the frontrunner in the elections on track to win an outright majority of the seats in Parliament – something that hasn’t happened since New Zealand implemented a proportional voting system 24 years ago. While parties are expected to form alliances to govern, Arden’s Labour Party could form the first single-party government in decades.
Taking into account the uniqueness of these elections further complicated by the global covid-19 pandemic, Arden, who addressed hundreds of the party’s supporters in Auckland, stated that her party had gotten more support from New Zealand this year than it has in the past 50 years.
“This has not been an ordinary election, and it’s not an ordinary time,” she said. “It’s been full of uncertainty and anxiety, and we set out to be an antidote to that.”
Ardern promised not to take her new supporters for granted and to govern for all New Zealanders.
“We are living in an increasingly polarized world, a place where more and more, people have lost the ability to see one another’s point of view,” she said. “I think in this election, New Zealanders have shown that this is not who we are.”
Reward For Excellent Crisis Management
Ardern’s victory at the polls comes as no surprise as New Zealand’s prime minister has become a representation of quality leadership in Europe, and the world at large, thanks in part to her rapid response to a health crisis, averting further damage to her people.
She was praised for her decision to pass new laws banning the deadliest of semi-automatic weapons as a quick response to last year’s attack on two mosques when a white supremacist gunned down 51 Muslim worshippers.
Similarly, in March this year, Ardern and health officials in the country instituted a strict lockdown in the country after 100 people tested positive for COVID-19. She shut the borders and outlined an ambitious goal of eliminating the virus entirely rather than just trying to control its spread.
Following another discovery in August after 102 days free, New Zealand’s Ardern swiftly imposed another lockdown in Auckland until the outbreak dissipated.
