Praised for her management of the Covid and with an absolute majority: Jacinda Ardern triumphs in the New Zealand elections

“New Zealand has shown the Labor Party its greatest support in almost 50 years,” said New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, after hearing the results where Labor have passed over the National Party, which has obtained just 27% of the votes, led by Judith Collins.

The decision of the New Zealanders has been clear: Ardern swept 47% of the vote. The victory of the leader of the Labor Party is so overwhelming that she has achieved an absolute majority with 64 seats.

Media such as El Mundo point out that one of its strengths has been its focus in the midst of the pandemic. The minister promised to eradicate the coronavirus in New Zealand, rather than control it.

On February 28, New Zealand reported its first case of Covid-19: a 60-year-old man who had traveled to Tehran, Bali and Indonesia. In just a few weeks the prime minister did not hesitate to make the decision to close the country.

“Currently we have 102 cases, but Italy also had them once,” Ardern said a few days later, on March 23, when he had already banned foreigners from entering and ordered that anyone who landed in the island state should isolate themselves for 14 quarantine days. The leader did not seek to contain the outbreak. But eradicate it. That was his promise.

Thus, on June 8, the leader celebrated that the last patient with Covid had been discharged. Everything returned to normal until new infections were recorded in Auckland in August, the first in 102 days.

In the first week of October, Ardern spoke the same June words: “We have defeated the virus again.” New Zealand has not registered a case of contagion since then, with just 25 deaths.

Very low figures due to the rapid action of the authorities when closing the country with just a hundred cases.

According to projections, Ardern will follow the progressive line of recent years, giving a boost to its environmental policy. It has publicly promised to advance its goal of 100% of New Zealand’s electricity generated by renewables by five years, as well as phasing out hard-to-recycle plastics by 2025.

When she won her first elections at the age of 37, she won over the international press after reviving her center-left party in the last elections of 2017, when no one considered her the winner and she became the second world leader to give birth while she was in office. He even took his baby to the United Nations.

Another face of Ardern has emerged at critical moments in the country of five million people, after the eruption of the White Island volcano or the attack on the two mosques in Christchurch. In the latter case, the prime minister wore a hijab when meeting with the survivors and delivered a highly applauded speech. “They are us,” he said then, referring to the Muslim community.

He also acted swiftly to pass new laws to ban the weapons used by the supremacist who carried out the massacre.