National Party set to lead coalition after Labour lost NZ polls

New Zealanders turned their backs on the ruling Labour Party in a national election on Oct 14 in favor of a conservative coalition led by a former business executive and one-term lawmaker Christopher Luxon.

With more than 500,000 "special votes" (roughly 20 percent of all votes) still to be counted, the final result will not be known until Nov 3.

Special votes include postal and overseas ballots, and votes from electors who voted outside their electorate.

But from the count so far, the Luxon-led National Party has secured 50 seats, a gain of 17 from the 2020 election, while the ACT Party won 11 seats, up from just one in 2020. Together they have 61 seats in the 121-seat national parliament.

Analysts say that going by past elections, the special votes could impact on a handful of seats where the vote was close.

Labour, the party that came to power in 2017 led by a young Jacinda Ardern and was returned in 2020, was decimated in the weekend election as voters deserted the party in droves. Labour secured just 34 seats, after having won 65 in the last election.

Ardern quit as prime minister and as a member of parliament earlier this year, leaving her deputy Chris Hipkins holding the reins.

Luxon is said to be talking with ACT leader David Seymour about forming a coalition government. So far, he has avoided talking with New Zealand First leader Winston Peters whose party won eight seats, after it failed to gain a single seat during the last election.

Even though the National Party and ACT together have a slim majority, this may change when the special votes are counted and Luxon may need the support of Peters, the 78-yar-old maverick of New Zealand politics.

"Once the special votes are counted and released on November 3, it is highly likely New Zealand First will be central to the formation of the next government," says Richard Shaw, professor of politics at Massey University in New Zealand.

"The National has lost seats through the specials at each of the last six elections, so it seems likely that will occur again," he told China Daily.

As for Labour, Shaw said the future does not look all that promising, and that the party may be destined for a "long period in opposition".

Analysts said many Labour voters opted for the Greens which gained 14 seats, up from 10 at the previous election, and the Maori Party which gained four seats, up two from the last election.

Labour's defeat will have significant implications for the party's leadership, policy direction and ideological positioning going forward, according to observers.

They said that Hipkins' decision to abandon Ardern's reform policies and move toward the center cost the party.

Among the plans Hipkins dropped or delayed was legislation that would have outlawed hate speech against religious groups in the wake of the deadly 2019 Christchurch terrorist attack which saw 51 people murdered.

Hipkins also walked away from a plan to merge the nation's public television and radio broadcasters, a new insurance scheme to help laid-off workers, and a mandate for fuel suppliers to increase their use of biofuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"Labour did not stand by its values," political commentator Morgan Godfrey told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

"When (Hipkins) made a so-called 'captain's call' to rule out the wealth and capital gains tax — that's when Labour started to bleed support to the Greens."

Prime minister-elect Luxon has begun preparing his team for government, but has said very little publicly, preferring to keep talks firmly behind closed doors.

Luxon said told Television New Zealand on Oct 15: "I want to work respectfully with each of the political parties that are involved. We're going to form a strong stable government. That's important.

"We ultimately have to wait until we've got clarity over the special votes."

If National and ACT were to benefit from the final votes, Luxon confirmed the pair would attempt to govern with a tiny majority.

"But it is all about getting the chemistry right," he said. "Having done a lot of negotiations in my life, if you've got a good strong relationship and chemistry, then you can actually work through the transactional issues."

Luxon and Seymour have met regularly while in opposition and are neighbors in Auckland's affluent eastern suburbs, but Luxon knows little about New Zealand First's Peters who has been a fixture of Kiwi politics for more than four decades.