Earlier this year, as prices started to seriously rise and incumbent governments the world over started to tug nervously on their collars, a Labour party insider put it to me very simply: “If petrol is three bucks a litre, we lose the election.”
Those of us who write about politics professionally don’t like to accept that the whole colourful drama of parliamentary life can be so easily swept aside by other circumstances, but it is largely true. Oil price shocks generally see incumbent governments turfed out – see NZ Labour’s Bill Rowling in 1975, US president Jimmy Carter in 1980 or this rigorous study of more than 200 elections in 50 democracies. It doesn’t seem to matter if you’re leftwing or rightwing – once people start to feel as if they can’t lead the lives they lived one year ago, they start blaming whoever is in charge. This goes a way to explain why the New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, still beloved overseas, faces the very real prospect of losing government next year.
