Today marked a much-awaited milestone in the marathon that will eventually decide the winner of the recent New Zealand election. ‘Special Votes’ (absentee, overseas and newly enrolled voters) totals have been announced today, and the results are good for the Centre/Left. Actually, very good indeed, but the reasons are complicated and will take a bit of explaining.
For those who just want to know if Jacinda Ardern is going to go one better than Jeremy Corbyn and actual depose a sitting right-wing government, then I’m happy to report that today the chances of this happy outcome just significantly improved. For those of you in a hurry, here is the Guardian’s take on today’s developments.
In my last post, Election Night on September 23rd, along with New Zealand’s complicated system of proportional representation, left us with only two possibilities: with ‘centrist’ party NZ First (and their wily leader Winston Peters) holding the balance of power — commencing negotiations to see whether they would suport the return of the arch-neoliberal National government, or go the other way and cap off a remarkable insurgent victory for the Labour/Green centre-left bloc.
For those not following this election, Labour had come back from an impossibly bad position a couple of months before election day, to a real chance of victory under the leadership of Labour’s charismatic new progressive leader Jacinda Ardern. They didn’t win outright on Election Night, and NZ First and Winston Peters were left sitting in between the Centre/Right (National) and Centre/Left (Labour/Green) blocs as ‘King/Queen-makers’ — having enough votes to play the deciding role in forming a new coalition government for New Zealand.
The Special Votes announced today (bringing us the final confirmed vote tally) were very important, and they delivered two crucial extra seats for the Labour/Green bloc. Accordingly, National was the party that lost two seats (NZ First and ACT were unchanged).
This is very important for two reasons:
1) The game has tightened up dramatically!
National finished Election Night with 46% of the vote. The Labour/Green bloc had 41.7%. Now, with the Special Votes, the needle has swung much closer towards parity between the blocs. National now has a final tally of 44.4% and Labour/Green has 43.2%. This is actually quite a spectacular move. Imagine how different the US landscape would look if absentee votes had moved Trump downwards by 1.6%!
Some right-wing commentators have been beating the drum since Election Night that the right bloc had a ‘clear moral mandate’ through getting a clearly higher proportion of the raw vote. That argument is now gone, as the two sides are effectively in a tie. Winston Peters and NZ First may have been susceptible to the idea that they might be backing the ‘losing side’ if they ended up siding with Labour/Green when the gap was 46% v 41%. Now that the gap is 44% v 43% the idea of the centre/left being major ‘losers’ of the total vote has much less currency. This is important in forming a government in NZ as you need to be able to sell a narrative that your coalition is the ‘legitimate’ option and combination.
2) The Centre/Left now has a much more stable platform of seats to negotiate from.
New Zealand has a 120-seat parliament. To form government you need 61 seats (because you need to appoint the Speaker (who doesn’t vote) and still have a 60-59 majority). On election night, the vote count placed the Labour/Green/NZ First bloc at potentially exactly 61 seats while the National/NZ First combination was 67 seats.
This did pose a very major impediment to Jacinda Ardern’s capacity to negotiate a coalition government with NZ First. 61 seats is tight for governing. Previous NZ governments which relied on a bare 61-seat majority were vulnerable to by-elections, as well as potential defections of rebellious MPs. It would only take one rebel to cross the floor and the government could fall.
Now, with two extra seats, a potential Labour/Green/NZ First coalition would have a much more comfortable 63-57 seat majority, while National/NZ First would have 65/55.
This is such an important factor in forming a successful coalition, that NZ First leader Winston Peters would not even start formal negotiations until the Special Votes had been counted. Until today, there was an outside (albeit historically unlikely) chance that National might have actualy gained an extra seat which would have dashed all hopes for a centre/left coalition. Even if the Special Votes had not changed the overall distribution of seats between the parties, or if the Centre/Left had only gained one seat from Special Votes, the result would have made a Labour/Green/NZ First coalition much less likely. But gaining two seats is a game-changer! It brings the potential majority to 63-57 seats for Labour/Green/NZ First which even the most sceptical commentators consider to be ‘comfortable’. It would take quite a meltdown to lose 4 parliamentarians across the floor to vote against your government on any bill. It would be even more unlikely if it was a vote of confidence that would effectively force a new election. This is born out by our right wing media which have described this result as a ‘shock’ and and warned their fretful right-wing readers that ‘PM Jacinda Ardern is now a real possibility’!
3) The implications: it is absolutely game-on for the coalition negotiations!
National Prime Minister Bill English would have been quietly hoping for an underwhelming special vote count for the Labour/Green bloc. He got the opposite, and now the media narrative is of a significant swing to the Centre/Left. Many of the right wing talking points have been rendered void, and Jacinda Ardern just fronted a press conference looking very excited indeed about her prospects of persuading NZ First to join an exciting new government that would bring a change of direction for NZ rather than propping up a tired old right-wing government for a fourth term.
We have a tentative deadline of October 12th for announcing a successful coalition to form government, but many commentators think that it will take longer. Hopefully not the six weeks we waited in 1996!
4) Why were the Special Votes so good for the Centre/Left?
First, there were a lot of them. They include the votes of people who enrolled and voted at the same time (an option that is available in the last month before Election Day). Votes from people who are outside their home electorate also go into the Specials. And, there is also the important factor of the big NZ communities in Australia and the UK, as well as voters in every corner of the world (one of my friend’s sons voted at the NZ Consulate in Uganda!). The final Special Vote count announced today comprised a remarkable 17% of the total vote! This is unprecedented and showed just how many people were excited by Jacinda Ardern and enrolled to vote for the first time. It brought the final voter turnout to 79.8% (coming in just below the epic election of 2005 at 80.5%).
Second, the Special Votes seems to have turned up the ‘youthquake’ that Jacinda Ardern promised. At this election, for the first time ever, young people could enroll and vote at the same time – but their votes were then counted among the Special Votes. The huge lines of students at universities enrolling and voting for the first time anecdotally told us that something big was happening. We know that younger voters vote Left, so the potentially game-changing swing that the Special Votes have delivered today, is almost certainly down to all these new young voters (plus the large NZ communities in Australia and the UK where Jacinda got a lot of press coverage).
5) What is going to happen? Will Jacinda become our fairytale Prime Minister?
Here your prognosticating Pirate has to admit that his biases are mildly influencing his judgment! But here are the reasons why today’s events have put the right-wing media into a tailspin and make the chances of Jacinda becoming Prime Minister much more possible:
- Today was a chance for Special Votes to move National into a position of total dominance in the upcoming negotiations. Instead, it significantly shifted the needle, the narrative, the big ‘mo’, back toward the Centre/Left. National could have finished the job today. Their media toadies were gloatingly anticipating that this might happen. Sorry Tories, it is now game on!
- All of the ‘technical’ and ‘moral’ claims suggesting that the centre/right had the moral mandate, or the vastly more secure position to form government, have now disappeared. It is now a genuine horse race between the two sides.
- National has formed government for the last three terms. It is looking ‘pale, stale and male’. Winston Peters is signaling that this is likely to be his last term of office (he is getting on in age). Will he characterise his ‘legacy term’ as being the loyal prop for a fourth term National Government (with no actual new policy ideas and an election platform that consisted of a series of lies interspersed with claims to being ‘strong and stable’)? Or will he throw in his lot with an exciting new ‘change-making’ government that has suddenly engaged the interest of a whole new generation of voters and has openly campaigned for some major new policy initiatives – including some very bold ideas that are close to some of NZ First’s more cherished ideas? Winston Peters campaigned to ‘change the government’. There is now no technical reason for him not to do so. Adern’s first great task in the negotiations is to convince Winston that he can be part of a legacy-building government that will introduce important new policies and leave him with an enhanced political legacy when he retires (well, giving him at the very least something more than: ‘He propped up National’s fourth term faithfully’).
Can I try to be objective and put the other side of the equation?:
- Winston Peters has a good deal of policy affinity with Labour, but he does not love the Greens. This worries me. Usually he campaigns with constant insults towards the ‘loony Greens’. In mitigation, this time around he has left the Greens off his attack list, concentrating nearly all his fire on ‘Failed Neoliberal National’. He seems to have a good rapport with potential Green Minister of Transport Julie Anne Genter (a fabulous US import into our political scene) and restoring our rail network is one of his boldest policy promises this election, a passion which he shares with Genter…
- A three-way coalition is inherently less stable and organized than a two-way coalition. National+NZ First makes for a stable government. Labour+Green+NZ First is potentially less stable. This will be Ardern’s second greatest task in coalition talks – convincing Winston that his curmudgeonly centrist MPs will get along just fine with the Greens.
- There are some crucial ‘third rails’ in these negotiations. Labour, Greens and NZ First all have strong commitments to a change in immigration policy, but with very different ends in mind. This is a significant flashpoint. Labour and Greens want to massively increase refugee resettlement. NZ First wants to stop foreigners. There is also a sense that Labour’s immigration policy is in murky terrain. Ardern inherited the policy of her predecessor. She will need to set out her own position during negotiations. Immigration policy in NZ is very different to the US. It is too complicated to explain here, but if I am in the happy position to rejoice in a successful coalition, SP promises that he will post on this specific topic.
- The second flashpoint relates to the many elements of our political system that provide checks and balances to respect and ensure Maori rights. NZ First loathes this as a form of left-wing ‘NZ Apartheid’. For the centre/left this is sacred terrain. No diminishing of Maori political rights could be entertained by Labour/Green in a coalition negotiation. Apart from those two monster issues, most of the other policy terrain is friendly between the groups (give or take a few environmental issues). In past coalition negotiations, the ‘third rails’ have been quarantined and coalitions formed around a platform of policy where all parties could move forward in agreement. Jacinda Ardern needs a ringfence of steel, electrified, with guard towers around these areas, to make a Labour/Green/NZ First coalition government possible. There is a huge amount of shared policy between these three parties, but one touch of the third rail and the game is over…
Yes, choosing a government in New Zealand is indeed a marathon! Your faithful correspondent in New Zealand will keep you updated with all developments and I hope to be posting a diary within the next week or two celebrating the Prime Ministership of Jacinda r!