Election bloodbath for Nats
Apoll on the penultimate day of voting was promoted as showing the result on a ‘‘knifeedge’’. Instead, the knives were already sharpened and the election was a bloodbath.
Under John Key, National pulled in an almost comparably huge shares of the party vote. However, Jacinda Ardern’s Labour achieved its dominance by shifting a huge swathe of votes across the political median strip.
The Greens, who normally perform in inverse proportion to their larger centre-Left ally, increased their 2017 share of the vote.
Ardern has now pulled off two MMP firsts – the first government led by a party that did not win the popular vote, in 2017, and the first outright majority.
National’s caucus is in ruins. The combined centre-Right barely hit the mid 30s, even after including fringe straggler parties that contributed to a high wasted vote – which itself only serves to increase Labour’s dominance.
The devastation was no more evident than in Auckland Central. After the retirement of National incumbent Nikki Kaye during the Muller-era meltdown, her replacement Emma Mellow – a promising candidate – was forced into third place by the Greens’ Chloe Swarbrick and Labour’s Helen White.
The Greens face tough decisions. Their negotiating position is now very weak, and any accommodation in government is dependent on Ardern’s charity. The wealth tax, which dominated the final week of the campaign, is dead on arrival.
This may please the party’s membership and its more radical new MPs, who will be freer to criticise government decisions.
Labour presented a small target in the campaign, ruling out policies that were either too radical or transformational, depending on your perspective. But in the coming parliament, it presents a huge target, and may extend an olive branch to the Greens in order to protect from attacks on its left flank.
Similarly, during the past term the so-called ‘‘opposition from Hell’’, National’s large caucus, contested the centre ground against the government, convinced it could hold its plurality – not without cause until Covid changed the landscape irrevocably.
However, the composition of the National rump will take a much more conservative turn with last night’s decimation. They may be tempted to look back to 2002, when the party followed a wipeout by coming within a whisker of government in 2005. In that election, the party veered away from the centre in order to consolidate the centreRight.
However, in 2002 the handful of new MPs included Don Brash and John Key. It is hard to see a saviour of the same kind in the 2020 intake. The chief candidate is Botany candidate and former Air NZ chief executive Christopher Luxon, who has an impressive background but has not proved his retail political skills.
However, former leader Simon Bridges may also be receptive to approaches to resume the ‘‘worst job in politics’’.
The final two weeks of National’s campaign suggests its MPs are not yet ready to pull together for the good of the party or its supporters, and the newly enlarged ACT will have an opportunity to assume its previous mantle of the ‘‘real opposition’’ while National gets its house in order.
It brings in many untested MPs, on the back of the strong campaigning of David Seymour, and will widen the terms of debate about how Ardern deals with the many challenges of the next term.
Ardern walked on water last night, but the next three years is full of sharks.