Good luck with that, Jacinda

The people have spoken - well, a minority of them anyway. We have a coalition government that doesn't even have a plurality of the votes. After a month of dithering, the leader of the New Zealand First Party, Winston Peters, who lost his own electoral seat in last month's election and whose party was reduced to 7% of the vote, decided to form a coalition with the New Zealand Labour Party. Combined, the two parties won 44.1% of the party votes - less than the National Party's 44.4% - and yet they have been able to form a government because the Green Party, with 6.3% of the vote, is prepared to support them on 'confidence and supply' (i.e. on budget votes). 

It is not as if the partners to the polyamorous affair have much in common. New Zealand First is a nationalist, protectionist, anti-immigration party and its leader moulds himself on Robert Muldoon, the authoritarian New Zealand prime minister from 1975 to 1984 who took the country to the verge of bankruptcy. Labour is a classic, left-of-centre social democratic party, and the Greens are a typical 'watermelon' alliance of environmentalists and Marxists.

The new prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, is not only New Zealand's youngest premier in over a hundred years, she is the least experienced, having never held a full-time job outside of politics and never having held even an executive position in government. She will need to rule over a rag-tag coalition with less mandate than National to govern and to keep the oldest political fox of them all, Winston Peters, from eating all her chickens. I give it less than twelve months until her government disintegrates and we have another election.

In the meantime, I wish Jacinda Ardern and her coalition good luck and implore them not to stuff up our great little country too much before the big kids take over again.