Wellington, New Zealand — The Ruling Ardern‘s party takes a major lead in the early elections of New Zealand after she campaigned about her successful work in containing the Covid-19 virus.
On the general election held on Saturday, 10 percent of the vote counted shows that the centre-left Labour Party of Ardern achieved 49.9%. This indicates that the party will be recieving a total of 64 seats from the 120-member parliament.
Although the figures are early, they exceed pre-election opinion polls and if it remains consistent for the time being, the Labour’s strongest showing in decades will be seen.
Furthermore, even if Ardern fails to gain a majority, she is expected to recieve the support from existing coalition partner the Greens, who have 8.4 percent or 11 seats, therefore, giving Ardern the lead.
On the other hand, the opposition party Judith Collins’ centre-right National Party got only 26%, meaning they only recieved 34 seats from the parliament. This is becoming closer to being the worst results in nearly 20 years of election.
One of the major campaign of Ardern has been campaigning about how she contained the Covid-19 virus and had only 25 deaths in a country with a population of five million.
During her campaign trial, Ardern repeatedly asked, “Who’s better placed to keep New Zealand safe and who’s better placed to get us on track to recovery?,” encouraging people to vote for her.
While the election of New Zealand was initially supposed to be held on September 19, it was delayed due to a virus outbreak in the most populous country in New Zealand, Aukland. However, the virus has now been contained due to the great work of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
