In what could be one of the Covid era’s most abrupt reversals of political fortune, polls on New Zealand’s election on 14 October suggest voters appear ready to abandon the country’s centre-left government – once wildly popular – in favour of a centre-right coalition whose policies would permanently draw a line under the Jacinda Ardern era of politics.
With the major parties, leftwing Labour and rightwing National, tussling over the centre, it is not a clear surge of favour for rightwing politics driving the shift. Instead, New Zealanders – exhausted by the pandemic, a cost of living crisis and frustration with their leaders – are mulling a shift to the right in what some analysts have deemed a “change” election.
