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“I’ve been having a lot of fun, you see?” Judith Collins, leader of New Zealand’s center-right National Party, was enthusiastic at a fan-packed campaign rally outside the South Island city of Dunedin. “I can not stop smiling”.
That was true; she could not. Collins, the country’s opposition leader, is running in the October 17 election against one of the country’s most popular prime ministers in recent times, Jacinda Ardern, who is harassed by selfies wherever she goes, with a crowd so big and tight that security and Covid Precautions often seem to be neglected.
Collins clearly yearns, like any leader, for the same treatment. She is the third leader of her party since May, a veteran and flamboyant politician whose cutting phrases are adored by her admirers and detested by her detractors.
She has inherited a tough job, especially for a politician that most New Zealanders already seem to have made up of, presenting herself as a leader with broad enough sympathy to save the jobs of her lawmakers in the next vote. In fact, he said Thursday, he would go one step further: “I have a country to save,” he said, smiling.
But during his day in Dunedin, Collins took no chances less than 10 days before the election, after an awkward moment in Auckland on Wednesday when his staff were seen pointing out their supporters in position along their walk route, and she and her media entourage. they were denied entry to a store.
On Thursday, he preferred to preach to a choir of business audiences and fans in more rural areas, the traditional base of the National Party, rather than spontaneous random encounters.
Her base loves her, and for them Collins put on a show, very energetic and often seems to improvise her jokes with appreciative laughs. A 1 News Colmar Brunton poll on Thursday night showed Ardern’s Labor Party holding 47%, within one seat of governing alone, with Collins’ National Party falling one point to 32%.
Up to 13% of voters in the poll were undecided, but Collins did not seek them out.
“I don’t know about you, but I love wearing gold,” the self-proclaimed fashion expert told a giggling audience of business owners at the Otago Chamber of Commerce.
Earlier, when his phone rang in the middle of a campaign stop, he told reporters with a sardonic lift of his careful eyebrows that the call had been from “one of my many friends.”
At a public meeting in a high school auditorium in Mosgiel, a service center for rural areas, where support for her was so evident that the audience’s response to her words sometimes took on a pantomime quality of cheers and boos , warmed the crowd with jokes and pointed to the “awake brigade cancellation culture.”
She was delighted with the support of her traditional fans. But just over a week before the elections, it was unclear if they would be enough. Ardern’s support has grown in response to the country’s seemingly successful Covid-19 response strategy, with one of the strictest lockdowns in the world resulting in one of the lowest death toll in the world.
Ardern, Collins said, would offer voters “love and a hug” after the global pandemic. The national leader would offer them “hope and a job,” he said, promising a better economic response.
But when it came to unplanned encounters with the public, he took the unusual step, so close to Election Day, of giving reporters a slip and making an unannounced stop across town to interact with the public. no cameras present.
Later, journalists could only take her word for it when she recounted requests for “selfie after selfie,” eager to convince that, in terms of the apparent validity of the 2020 campaign, she could pay Ardern.
Despite the ardent crowd of fans at the public gathering, where selfies were in high demand afterward, some undecided voters peppered the crowd.
One was Siobhan Smith, who had cast votes for both National and Labor before. She had brought her 10-year-old daughter to see Collins speak because it was “very positive” to see two women in leadership positions.
“It is not simply that we have a woman as prime minister and a woman as leader of the opposition,” he said. “It’s that they are two very different women, and they both show very different ways that women can lead.”
Certainly nothing seemed to harm Collins’s pleasure.
“These things happen, it’s a land of opportunity,” he cheerfully told the crowd at the Otago Chamber of Commerce of his 11-hour rise to the leadership of the National party.
“Isn’t it fun? It’s so much fun. “
