Not only Jacinda Ardern, a small “star” was also born on the right: libertarian David Seymour
Elections were held in New Zealand on Saturday. Everyone is talking about Jacinda Ardern and it is natural. The Labor premier achieved a large victory, in the wake of the consensus obtained for having managed the coronavirus emergency in terms of efficiency – albeit not without significant impacts for the economy.
However, these elections have also brought out a small "star" on the right side of the political spectrum. It is David Seymour who has imposed his "libertarian right" party ACT as the third force on the political scene, with 8 percent of the vote and 10 seats.
Seymour has undoubtedly taken advantage of the heavy retreat of the National Party , the traditional conservative New Zealand party, which, after the loss of the government three years ago, has remained constantly in the shadow of the strong image of Prime Minister Ardern.
The National Party has changed three leaders in the past six months alone. Following the torpedoing of Simon Bridges, sunk by unfavorable polls, his successor Todd Muller lasted at the helm of the party for just two months before deciding to retire. In the end, the match remained in the hands of Judith Collins who could do nothing against the young and dynamic Labor leader.
Faced with the National Party crisis, ACT has regained a long-lost political space.
ACT (which was originally the acronym of Association for Consumers and Taxpayers) was founded by Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble who in the 1980s were the leading economists of the New Zealand "liberal turn". Although they worked in Labor governments at the time, their contribution is often considered the equivalent of Ronald Reagan's and Margaret Thatcher's “conservative revolutions”.
Douglas and Prebble founded ACT when the Labor Party returned to a more classic social democratic connotation. The new party rapidly emerged as a "classical liberal" center-right force, achieving good results in the 1996, 1999 and 2002 elections.
Unfortunately, throughout this period, ACT's actual impact on political choices was limited by the fact that it was in opposition to Helen Clark's Labor government.
In 2008, however, the National Party went to government with the new leader of John Key and ACT joined the parliamentary majority as a "junior partner". This center-right agreement continued in the following years, but the popularity of John Key reduced ACT to a minimum, so much so that the effective survival of the "libertarian" party was guaranteed precisely by ad hoc agreements of "desistance" granted to it by the major party.
Today ACT is once again a significant political force and the substantially proportional structure of the New Zealand electoral system means that it could consolidate over time its contribution to a center-right alternative to the government of Jacinda Ardern.
Certainly, David Seymour, with his fresh image and remarkable communication skills, seems to have those qualities that, after John Key, the National Party lacks.
And it is certainly significant how, in this historical phase, at least in the English-speaking world, we can still think of "winning the votes" through crystalline policies and principles in the sense of individual freedom, free market and limited government.
For Seymour, Ardern's popularity may be more ephemeral than it seems today. “Labor were re-elected because they handled the Covid crisis well, not because they implemented particular reforms. My feeling is that the government has achieved a large victory without having any real policy to tackle the challenges facing New Zealand ”.
In this sense, the mission of a “classical liberal” and “libertarian” right will have to be precisely to create the recipe for the “recovery”, once the costs and the economic and social consequences of the lockdown are more evident.
The post Not only Jacinda Ardern, a small "star" was also born on the right: the libertarian David Seymour appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/non-solo-jacinda-ardern-una-piccola-stella-e-nata-anche-a-destra-il-libertario-david-seymour/ on Wed, 21 Oct 2020 03:42:00 +0000.