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New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks at the Labor Election Day party after the Labor Party won the New Zealand general election in Auckland on October 16, 2020 (Photo by MICHAEL BRADLEY / AFP).
WELLINGTON, New Zealand – The New Zealand opposition said Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s landslide victory means she no longer has an excuse for failing to deliver on her visionary promises.
Ardern won a historic absolute majority in Saturday’s vote, the first since New Zealand adopted proportional voting in 1996, meaning it can implement policies without the support of minority parties.
The charismatic leader was criticized during her first term for failing to deliver on key promises like protecting the environment and reducing child poverty.
Opposition leader Judith Collins said Ardern’s electoral success meant that she could no longer blame the coalition partners for thwarting her progressive agenda because she now had a free hand to do whatever she wanted.
“The government has a mandate to do all the things they promised to do, so they cannot blame anyone else for not complying,” he told reporters.
The campaign during the vote focused on the government’s successful response to the coronavirus, and Ardern called it the “Covid election”, and crisis management has defined the first term of the center-left leader.
In addition to the pandemic, he responded with compassion and decisive political action after the attack on the Christchurch mosques in March 2019, when a white supremacist gunman killed 51 Muslim worshipers.
It also comforted a shocked nation last December when a volcanic eruption on White Island, also known as Whakaari, killed 21 people and left dozens more with horrific burns.
New Zealand has recorded just 25 coronavirus deaths out of a population of five million, which, according to Collins, increased Ardern’s position in an electorate anxious about the pandemic.
“It was a tough campaign against a formidable opponent, and an opponent who was also seen as the face of Covid-19 (response),” the 61-year-old said.
– ‘Hospital pass’ –
Collins, known as “Crusher” for her hard-line policies when she was a police minister in a previous government, questioned Ardern’s high-spending response to New Zealand’s virus-induced recession.
“I hope our country does much better than I think fiscal policies and the current government’s configuration will allow it to do,” he said.
“I feel very concerned about my country.”
In his victory speech Saturday night, Ardern pointed to an increase in state housing, more renewable energy and other infrastructure investments.
He also spoke of more training programs, job creation, protecting the environment and a determination to tackle issues like climate change, poverty and inequality.
“We have a mandate to accelerate our response and our recovery, and tomorrow we start!” Ardern said.
Labor’s 49.1 percent of the vote was its best electoral performance since 1946, while National’s 26.8 was the second worst since the party was founded in 1936.
Collins said he would remain as the national leader but commission an independent review on how the party’s vote fell nearly 18 points since the last election in 2017.
Party support generally hovers around the mid-1940s, and Collins conceded that there was probably complacency among some of his colleagues who saw Ardern’s surprising victory three years ago as unique.
Collins also said she received “a hospital pass” when she took the job in July, becoming National’s third leader in four months as voters turned away from a party shaken by internal divisions.
Collins said the result cannot be attributed to any lack of effort during a grueling season.
“That’s what I’ve done,” he said. “I have tried very hard.”
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