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After Saturday’s election, won by outgoing Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s Parliament will be the most inclusive of all time, with many non-white people, members of the LGBTQ + community and the highest percentage of women elected. Never. 48 percent.
In the elections, the Ardern Labor Party won 64 seats out of 120: it is the first time since 1996 that a New Zealand party has managed to obtain an absolute majority in Parliament, without the need to form a coalition. Despite this, Ardern began negotiations for an alliance with the Greens, which won 10 seats. Before the elections, Ardern ruled in coalition with the nationalist and populist New Zealand First party, which failed to win a seat on Saturday. Whether ruling alone or in coalition with the Greens, Ardern will be the first fully center-left government in New Zealand since the 1970s.
– Read also: Jacinda Ardern won the elections in New Zealand
It is the Labor Party and the Greens primarily that make the New Zealand Parliament inclusive. Of the new Labor MPs, 55 percent are women, and among the Greens there are seven out of ten. In the main opposition party, the National Party, 31 percent of women are elected. Among the 40 new deputies are the first Afro-descendant New Zealand MP, Labor member Ibrahim Omar, the first from Sri Lanka, Vanushi Walters, also a Labor member, and the first from Latin America, Ricardo Menéndez de los Verdes, who is born in Mexico. Labor also elected 16 Maori MPs and others elected the Greens.
Furthermore, the new parliament will be made up of 10 percent openly lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people, the highest percentage of any parliament in the world, he says. Reuters. Among them are many prominent politicians, including openly gay Finance Minister Grant Robertson and LGBTQ + activist and Maori researcher Elizabeth Kerekere.
New Zealand’s parliament is even younger. Paul Spoonley, a professor at Massey University, told a Reuters that most new MPs are below average age and many are millennials, that is, born between 1981 and 1996. Ardern herself, when she was first appointed in 2017, was the youngest head of government at 37 years. in the world.
“We’ve seen a lot of older male and white candidates come out of Parliament, some of whom have been there for more than 30 years,” Spoonley said.
– Read also: Who is a “millennial”?
In New Zealand there are no quota systems to guarantee a predetermined number of seats in Parliament for women or members of minorities. Each party has the freedom to determine the composition of its own lists, even if an informal system of “soft quotas” exists in New Zealand politics: Jennifer Curtin, director of the Institute of Public Policy at the University of Auckland, in an interview with Radio New Zealand has said that “most parties … try to at least make sure the lists are a mirror of New Zealand society”, although conservative parties tend to place women and members of minorities in the lower places on the electoral lists, in positions where it is more difficult to be elected. The only exception is the Labor Party, which in 2013 voted an internal regulation that obliges the party to nominate at least half of its members.
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