Like all good speechwriters, I have spent the last nine days of tense coalition negotiations writing two diaries to cover both potential outcomes. Happily, I get to publish this one!
As many of you are waking up to find out in the US, our new progressive hero Jacinda Ardern has walked a narrow tightrope to victory and emerged as Prime Minister of a new coalition government, ending nine years of National Party rule. She has shown herself to be a gifted combination of both a charismatic campaigner as well as a skillful negotiator in coalition talks. She has belied her age to deliver a painful defeat to a sitting Right-wing government in a fashion that was unthinkable only two months ago. The resulting government is anchored by the Labour Party and has a coalition agreement with NZ First supported by the Green Party. I haven’t yet had time to parse the text of the agreement or the challenge that lies ahead working with NZ First – that task can wait until tomorrow. For today, I simply want to share with my Kossack friends what this victory for Jacinda means for all progressives around the world.
Ardern’s rise to become New Zealand’s youngest Prime Minister is remarkable for a number of reasons. I’ll highlight my top five:
1) She showed that no campaign is dead and buried no matter how dire the polling.
At 24% and dropping, the Labour Party was on life-support in July. In galvanizing Labour up to 36% by election night, Ardern brought Labour back from the dead. She also did it without entirely killing off the Green Party. National lost because while it kept its votes as high as it could, it did so by cannibalizing its supporting parties. Having eaten its own young (which, after all, is what you would logically expect a party of true neoliberals to do?), National could not scare enough voters away from the insurgent Centre/Left leaving itself vulnerable, tired, cynical-looking and bereft of ideas. Ardern also buried the old political maxim that it is madness to change your candidate two months out from election day. It is not madness if your new candidate is the real deal!
2) She is a compelling voice for a new generation of voters.
Young voters, over the last few years, have been looking for political champions who understand exactly how desperate things are looking for (even middle class) millennials. For the US and UK these champions were, oddly enough, two slightly eccentric older white guys who, nevertheless, both could clearly articulate what millennials know - that the system is broken. For Canada it was Justin, with his charisma and impeccable political breeding. For France it was Macron with his request for mutual destruction of the old political order (to be replaced, in both cases, by a new centrism?). But Jacinda is something else. 37 years of age and speaking of positive, transformational politics. She turned out to be an amalgam of all the other four. She is charismatic, compelling on the stump and tremendously effective with the political media and fronting on TV. Her appearances on youth TV and the internet displayed unrehearsed cool, with the kind of sharp intellect and self-deprecating humour that Kiwis love. Her election feels like a particularly pointed moment of generational change for global politics.
3) The Centre/Left is on the rise and it is rising on the back of a new generation of progressive voters.
Since Brexit and Trump, subsequent elections have decisively turned away from Right-wing political parties (hey Austria WTF — you are ruining my narrative!). This particular election in New Zealand was one that the Centre/Right should have easily won - if the old political logics had held true. National would have expected to sleepwalk to victory using standard arguments about rising prosperity for the middle classes and protecting the investment income of retirees. New Zealand has actually had strong economic growth (but not necessarily on the back of what we would consider to be good economic dynamics) and National has fanned a major boom in house prices that has delivered an impression of prosperity for middle class voters. National started this election cycle in 2014 with the Centre/Right holding something like 53% of the vote. They ended up this week with only around 45%. In stark contrast, at the start of this election cycle the Labour/Green bloc had only a devastating 35% of the vote. They ended up riding the Jacindamania wave to 43% and a solid shot at governing. The 8% swing between Centre/Right and Centre/Left that has happened over the last three years (actually, more like the last three months!) is impressive given there were no major intervening events like a war, economic crisis or diplomatic fracas. The New Zealand electorate is not traditionally volatile. This kind of swing means something – and in our specific case, it signifies the rise of a newly empowered generation who (like in the UK election) confounded political pundits by actually turning up and voting. Jacinda gave them something to vote for, and they did.
4) This was a big loss for the Right Wing corporate-owned media.
National, and its unfathomably popular prior leader John Key, had the media lapping out of his Teflon-coated hands. I watched in disbelief as nine years of National abuse of power, open corruption, demonization of vulnerable sectors of NZ society, and nasty, smug, born-to-rule arrogance, was constantly gilded by our media as demonstrating that National were a ‘remarkably successful government’ doing a ‘wonderful job’ with our economy. National starved our state-run media for funds and spent endless time chatting on talkback radio or appearing on fawning news shows with their right-wing media buddies. Jacinda smashed that compact between National and the media. Journalists loved her, online articles about her generated clicks, her interviews were genuinely funny and insightful. In short, she has displayed a genius for retail politics. In an age where the corporate-owned media already has its right-leaning thumb on the scales whenever they are reporting on politics, economics and social justice, we really can’t underestimate the importance of progressives doing an excellent job of retail politics. We can have all the worthy policy in the world, but you’ve got to get the retail politics right to get the ‘cut through’ we need to overcome corporate media bias!
5) It feels great to win again!
Finally, and as our special gift to progressives around the world, this is the most important thing of all: it feels great to win! As someone who closely follows politics in NZ, Australia, the UK, USA, France and Canada, it seems like we’ve spent years feeling like a political punching bag. Trump’s election was the worst day of my political life (closely followed by the elections of Reagan, Thatcher and Bush II). For progressives in NZ, the last time we won a tight election was 2005! There comes a time in the tide of politics when you just feel like you can’t win and that dark and sinister forces are swirling around us in ways that baffle all good sense, ethics and confound hope. I was chilled to my core when recently reading an account of the Thatcher years in the UK which reminded me that Labour waited an interminable 18 years for that dark time to end! And even when the losses are starting to happen by smaller and smaller margins (think the Georgia 6th), it is hard to keep on believing that the tide really HAS turned in our favour. Sometimes you just want to be able to sit in front of the TV, raise a glass of something spirituous, and bellow in excitement as one of our champions walks up to the podium, arms raised in triumph, to deliver a victory speech. It gives us hope for the future and it soothes years of past hurts and disappointments. It tells us that a slim majority of our fellow citizens are not total idiots or politically reprehensible, and it allows people like me to sit beside my children and feel a momentary shiver of relief which briefly suppresses what is otherwise an ongoing, underlying, murmur of fear and anxiety about what kind of world we are bequeathing to the next generation.
I am so glad I didn’t have to post the other diary….
Thank you Jacinda.