CHRISTCHURCH, Oct. 17 (BBC) - New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has won a landslide victory in the country’s general election.
With most ballots tallied, Ms Ardern’s centre-left Labour Party has won 49% of the vote and she is projected to win a rare outright parliamentary majority.
The opposition centre-right National Party, currently on 27%, has admitted defeat in Saturday’s poll.
The vote was originally due to be in September, but was postponed by a month after a renewed Covid-19 outbreak. The polls opened at 09:00 local time (20:00 GMT Friday) and closed at 19:00.
More than a million people had already voted in early polling which opened up on 3 October.
New Zealanders were also asked to vote in two referendums alongside the general election.
According to the Electoral Commission, the Labour Party are on 49% of the vote, followed by the National Party on 27%, and the ACT New Zealand and Green parties on 8%.
“New Zealand has shown the Labour Party its greatest support in almost 50 years,” Ms Ardern told her supporters after the victory. “We will not take your support for granted. And I can promise you we will be a party that governs for every New Zealander.”
media captionJacinda Ardern’s key leadership moments
National Party leader Judith Collins has congratulated Ms Ardern and promised her party would be a “robust opposition”.
“Three years will be gone in the blink of an eye,” she said, referring to the next scheduled election. “We will be back.”
Ms Ardern’s Labour Party is projected to win 64 seats - enough for an outright majority. No party has managed to do so in New Zealand since it introduced a voting system known as Mixed Member Proportional representation (MMP) in 1996.
Ms Ardern pledged to instil more climate-friendly policies, boost funding for disadvantaged schools and raise income taxes on top earners.
This was never going to be a nail-biting election. Opinion polls had put Ms Ardern on course to win a second term. The results have confirmed what everyone already knew.
The real question was how big Jacinda Ardern and her party were going to win and by anyone’s standard this is a remarkable victory.
It’s a big win for a party that has been carried through by the star power of its leader. Ms Ardern has led New Zealand through a terrorist attack, a natural disaster and a global pandemic - and has done so focusing on kindness and compassion.
But things are going to be different during the second term. New Zealand is in recession for the first time in 11 years and Labour has been criticised for not having a clear Covid-19 recovery plan. A big bulk of this work is going to be turning the economy around with a pandemic still looming large. It’ll take more than the Ms Ardern’s popularity and charisma to get that done.