For governments facing a growing wave of coronavirus cases as fall turns to winter, there’s a stark lesson in Saturday’s stunning election victory for New Zealand’s incumbent Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern: Voters really want their governments to suppress the pandemic.
A landslide victory means Ardern could govern with the first outright majority since her country adopted proportional representation in the 1990s, with her Labour party on track to win the largest share of the vote in 70 years.
That’s a remarkable turnaround. At the time New Zealand went into one of the world’s most stringent lockdowns in late March, she’d been mostly trailing the opposition National party in opinion polls for nine months.