Asian Angle | New Zealand’s mundane election: like Narnia to America’s Trumpian apocalypse
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- Ardern versus Collins, Trump versus Biden: only one of these debates showed the signs of a functional democracy
In recent weeks, signs have popped up all over this part of Auckland bearing an oversized photograph of a young man in a suit.
He is slim, clean-cut, a harmless looking greenhorn, the sort of young man who seems too insubstantial to hold up the very suit on his body. If you didn’t know any better, you might mistake him for the assistant manager at the electronics store. But this is in fact Simeon Brown, our area’s 29-year-old member of parliament. The signs are for his campaign for re-election.
In opinion polls published on October 8, Labour was ahead of National 47-32, and 50 per cent of voters preferred Ardern as prime minister, while only 23 per cent preferred her chief competitor.
If Labour can win an outright parliamentary majority, then it will be able to form a government on its own without allying with any of the minor parties.
