This story, Germany to ease government debt limits in major step aimed at boosting economy, defense spending,AP, 6 March 2015, reflects my comments in Germany’s Election 2025. (And note Reforming the debt brake: Now or never! Landesbank Baden-Württemberg, 28 Feb 2025. And Germany’s election victor must ditch its debt rules—immediately, The Economist 24 Feb 2025. These are gung-ho stories.)

The plan in Germany is to use the ‘lame-duck’ Parliament that was voted out on 23 February 2025 to alter that country’s constitution. To do this, a two-thirds majority is required in Parliament, and the Chancellor-elect (Friedrich Merz) believes he will not be able to get such a majority in the new parliament, which convenes at the end of March.

To achieve this change in Germany’s constitution, the provisional coalition (CDU/CSU/SPD) will need the support of either the Green Party (in the new parliament) or the ‘liberal’ (ie like New Zealand’s ACT) Free Democratic Party (who will not feature in the new parliament). Hitherto – before 2025 – the CDU, the FDP, and the SPD, were the main supporters of the debt brake. They understood it – in 2009, when it was added to the Constitution – as a means of hobbling any future government which might oppose fiscal austerity; as a means of baking-in, for all foreseeable time, their particular macroeconomic philosophy.

(New Zealand, though with a less formal constitution, has the 1989 Reserve Bank Act and the 1994 Fiscal Responsibility Act effectively baked in. And for similar reasons; to make it extremely difficult for a future government to undertake reforms similar to the very popular macroeconomic policies that were implemented, and successful, in the late 1930s.)

Germany has less than two weeks to break its self-imposed shackle. If they miss that deadline, if they have to use the new parliament, they will have to do something like what Adolf Hitler did in 1933 with the Enabling Act. The irony is that the parties expected to vote against the emergency measure will be the parties – strong in Eastern Germany – who, if in power, would benefit most from a general release of the debt brake.

For the Green Party it will be a case of ‘Which side are you on?’; the Establishment or the Anti-Establishment? This vote may be ‘make or break’ for the German Greens. Historically, the Greens have been opposed to the use of the debt brake to hobble progressive domestic policies. Will they now favour a piece of unprincipled political manoeuvring so that Germany can put itself in a position to make war on Russia or in support of Israel?

A Case for Comparison: New Zealand’s ‘Constitutional Crisis’ of 1984

Robert Muldoon was New Zealand’s caretaker Prime Minister in the week of so after his political defeat in the 14 July 1984 election. The constitutional crisis unfolded the following Monday.

Before and during the election campaign, the Labour Party’s ‘Finance Minister in Waiting’ Roger Douglas had indicated a desire to devalue the New Zealand Dollar by around twenty percent. This set up a ‘one-way-bet’ within the monied community; sell New Zealand dollars for another currency, wait for the election, then buy-back New Zealand dollars. At best there would be windfall capital-gains of 20%; at worst there would be no losses.

So, in the weeks leading up to the election, a financial crisis took place on account of the dramatic rundown of foreign exchange reserves. After the election, Douglas and Prime Minister elect David Lange wanted Robert Muldoon to immediately devalue the New Zealand dollar by twenty percent. Muldoon was reluctant to grant the one-way-speculators their maximum windfall profits; he favoured a much smaller five-percent devaluation.

This reluctance was presented as a constitutional crisis, because the ‘lame duck’ Prime Minister (and Finance Minister) disagreed with the incoming administration. Though eventually Muldoon conceded. Subsequently, the foreign exchange crisis has always been dubbed a constitutional crisis – a crisis of democracy – because the outvoted ‘lame-duck’ government was reluctant to give way to the government-elect. On the matter of the best policy, Muldoon was correct; a 5% devaluation would have been optimal. But nobody seemed to care about that; the barely contested narrative was that in a proper democracy the incoming parliament is always right, even when it’s wrong!

On this basis, what Friedrich Merz is planning to do should be a political scandal. But it probably won’t be. In the end, its all about who’s pushing the narratives, and whose interest it is to buy into which narrative.

Friedrich Merz’s double narrative

In Merz’s first narrative, public debt is bad, so bad that it must be curtailed through a country’s constitution. In his second narrative, Russia is worse; and the United States has become an unreliable ally. Merz still wants to have it both ways. He wants Germany (and the European Union) to continue to be self-hobbled on social spending, including those automatic stabilisers that prevent recessions turning into depressions. He wants to have access to unlimited public debt only for a limited purpose; freedom to wage war, to pursue military spending (despite his country not being under military threat). Mainly as a concession to his putative coalition partner, Merz will agree to use public debt (beyond that presently allowed for) to provide some improvements in public capital infrastructure. He continues to promulgate both an anti-public-debt narrative and an anti-Russia narrative. He wants to perpetuate a forever stalemate in the Russia-Ukraine war, and to promote a baseless domino theory narrative about Russia’s global military ambitions. Germany borders neither Russia nor Ukraine.

Certainly, there is an argument for Germany to have a defence force in balance with the totality of the public sphere, especially in a liberal democracy which sets its own foreign policy. In that context, any German government should be able to persuade the entire parliament (not just two-thirds) to proceed by removing the debt brake without privileging military spending. The recently elected German government should be able to do this with the Bundestag-elect. But in the present context, the constitutionally dubious proposal is not about self-defence, but in about the pursuit of a geopolitical narrative which posits an urgent need for Western Europe to escalate the Russia-Ukraine War.

Historical Military Conflicts between Russia and Foreign Powers since Tsar Peter the Great

While Russia expanded eastwards in much the same way as the United States expanded westward, there has never been anything like evidence that Russia would like to become a global hegemon. As such, Russia has never attacked German territory with expansion in mind. Russia did ‘liberate’ Eastern Europe at the end of World War Two, and continued to control most of Eastern Europe (including a portion of Germany). But that was the end of a vicious conflict in which Germany coveted much of Russia’s territory. Russia (or Soviet Union as the Russian Empire was then) never sought to extend its living space into Germany, though it did inadvertently in 1945 (in the former East Prussia, the Kaliningrad enclave today).

World War One started on 1 August 1914, when Germany declared war on Russia. And the Soviet Union’s ‘Great Patriotic War’ began when Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.

Other great power military invasions of the Russian Empire included that by Sweden in the 1700s (Sweden was a ‘great power’ then), repelled by Tsar Peter the Great. Then there was Napoleon’s invasion by France in 1812, the subject of Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace. Then there was the conflict in the 1850s in Crimea, involving United Kingdom and France and Florence Nightingale (Crimean War); and an abortive invasion by United Kingdom and United States on the incipient Soviet Union in August 1918 (at Archangel and at Vladivostok). (In addition, Russia fought Japan in Manchuria in 1905; Japan opened hostilities. Both Russia and Japan were emulating the prior European powers’ aggression towards China.)

The Domino Theory as applied to Russia

We should mention the Soviet Invasion of its neighbour, Afghanistan, in 1979. This serves as an analogue for the present Russia-Ukraine war. It this stage we should note several things: that Afghanistan was the neighbour of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union had genuine concerns about western-power game-playing in Afghanistan, that Afghanistan was not intended by Soviet Russia as the first domino of a global military campaign, and that the world is still dealing with the unforeseen consequences of post-1976 foreign-power-meddling in Afghanistan. The 1989 outcome, a withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, should not be seen as a credible template for an end to the present war. (‘Game playing’, for the West, is a semi-formal process, representing an application of game theory, a branch of economics.)

Despite the historical record being one of Western European aggression towards Russia – and not vice versa – the present conflict in Ukraine is being increasingly framed (without evidence) as Russia waging a ‘domino war’, meaning that once the Ukrainian domino is knocked over, there will be no halting Russia’s alleged ambitions to control the western world. (Indeed, in the White House rhetorical fracas on 28 February, the comment by Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy that set off Donald Trump was the suggestion that Trump might “think differently” when Russia had secured territory on the Atlantic coast of Europe.)

In three years, Russia has not had sufficient military power to fully appropriate the Oblast of Donetsk, in Ukraine. Under what conceivable scenario might the Putin military machine have the capacity or competence to threaten Germany or indeed any part of the European Union?

This is not the first time of course that the domino theory has been applied to Russia. Many of us will remember how North Vietnam was portrayed as a ‘Communist’ stooge – a Soviet Union proxy – and that if the Communists won in Vietnam they would be all around the Pacific Rim next.

1885 and all that

Going further back into history, there was the Russian Scare, which peaked in New Zealand in 1885. New Zealand’s major cities still have the gun emplacements constructed in 1885, to protect the colony from the Russians! Near the albatross colony at Taiaroa Head, Otago, there is a disappearing gun that’s still in pristine condition. And the similar gun at Auckland’s North Head is also a major tourist attraction.

(New Zealand references include the ‘fake news’ article: War with Russia. A Calamity for Auckland. Hostile Visit of Russian Ironclad. Seizure of Gold and Hostages, Daily Southern Cross, 19 February 1873. And: The Russians are here! New Zealand Geographic 2015; The Russians are coming! NZ History; The Enemy that never was: the New Zealand ‘Russian scare’ of 1870-1885, 1976, by Glynn Barratt.)

It’s worth noting that the 1880s was in New Zealand a period of fiscal austerity – the global Long Depression, and in New Zealand – in which defence spending was being pushed despite what was, for all practical purposes, a public sector debt brake.

What was happening in and around 1885 was conflict in Afghanistan between the United Kingdom and the Russian Empire; conflict in which the United Kingdom was portraying Russia as a domino-style aggressor. (Refer the Panjdeh Incident. This period in British military history was sometimes known as the Great Game, and it includes the Crimean War.)

The Russians never came. (Though 101 years later a Russian ship was sunk through misadventure in New Zealand waters.)

Who’s Threatening Who in the Former Soviet Union?

Russia has always seen Ukraine as being part of Greater Russia. Indeed, Kyiv was Russia’s foundation city. In 2022, Russia’s Plan A was to do to Ukraine exactly what the United States did to Iraq in 2003; use military force to bring about regime change through conquest. Aggression, indeed. That war was apparently within the ‘international rules’; or was an ‘acceptable’ departure from those rules. (And, as of now, civilian casualties in Ukraine have been fewer than those of Iraq in the Iraq War.)

Russia’s Plan B has been to redraw the former provincial boundary between Russia and Ukraine, as Russia did in Georgia in 2008 with the effective incorporation of South Ossetia into Russia. (In 2008, there was no subsequent domino invasion of the wider world, and the West was not as invested in Georgia as it came to be in Ukraine.) These border disputes reflect that the former Soviet Union provincial boundaries might not have been optimised for a world in which former republics have become nation states.

From 1999, the United States has overseen the process in which a new state, Kosovo, has been created through a split that Serbia was forced to accept; it was a commonsense rationalisation arising from the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, despite the supposed sanctity of international borders.

None of these issues warranted escalation into a world war. Nor does the present Ukraine dispute. Nor did the Third Balkan War (1914); a war that did (but needn’t have) become World War One.

The irony is that Plan B, the plan Russia is following, is the lesser plan; a partial military conquest is always lesser than a full conquest such as the 2003 Iraq War. And a second irony is that, if hostilities do not end this or next month, then Russia (which seems to have settled for some form of Plan B) may end up achieving its original Plan A goal.

War is a nasty business. There should always be alternatives to war, so that conflicting security concerns can be understood and managed peacefully. It requires international ‘players’ seeking mutual optimisation rather than ‘victory’ for one party over another.

What has been the game of the United States and its European proxies?

Three Well-Informed Realists

John Mearsheimer is an American international relations scholar and practitioner who distinguishes between the ‘liberals’ and the ‘realists’ in places like Washington. He’s firmly in the realist camp. And he’s able to evaluate the debates between the two groups. This short clip on YouTube is an interview with John Anderson, former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia (under John Howard). He traces how, from the time of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the liberal foreign policy hawks have always pushed for the ongoing eastward expansion of Nato after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. And how realists (including former senior European political leaders Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel) opposed this, especially the push to get Nato into Ukraine and Georgia; but were outmanoeuvred by the ‘liberals’. Journalist Peter Hitchens echoes this realist view, also in an interview with Anderson, noting how democracies will get into wars on the basis of overhyped narratives, and on account of those same narratives find it almost impossible to get out of these wars.

Jeffrey Sachs is an esteemed Harvard and Columbia University development economist, who’s been a consultant on global economic development and has been a first-hand witness to much geopolitical policymaking over the last four decades. You can see and hear Sachs in this long clip; in an address/discussion to the European Parliament in late February 2025. He connects the 1990s’ United States expansionist project to the philosophy of Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example outlined here in A Geostrategy for Eurasia, Foreign Affairs 1997; though noting that American unipolar hegemony builds on British Empire principles that go back to Lord Palmerston in the 1850s, and to the early twentieth century theories of Halford Mackinder. Brzezinski was an important figure, United States’ rival foreign policy guru to the pragmatic realist Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. It was under Brzezinski’s period in power as National Security Adviser, in the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter, that the Cold War – dampened in the early 1970s under Richard Nixon’s presidency – reheated; and that the United States started meddling in Afghanistan.

Peter Turchin is the Russian-born American cliodynamicist (scholar of long period history with the use of long-period statistics) who wrote in End Times (2023) and a number of other important books in the last quarter-century. He has substantial insights into the political and business dynamics of the United States, and of Russia along with its historical satellites such as Belarus and Ukraine. Turchin sees – for the 1990s – the United States, Russia, and Ukraine as true plutocracies (or ‘oligarchies’), subject to the power and foibles of the very rich. For the United States, that influence has waxed and waned throughout its history, but has always been there. Russia, Turchin observes, ceased to be a plutocracy after what was effectively a coup in the late 1990s on the part of the former military/bureaucratic establishment. Belarus never got started as an oligarchy. But Ukraine continues as a true plutocracy, and the United States liberal establishment invested heavily into ensuring that Ukraine would remain so. He says in End Times “By 2014, American ‘proconsuls’, such as veteran diplomat Victoria Nuland, had acquired a large degree of power over the Ukrainian plutocrats.” On this basis, it would seem to be true that the American Lobby in Ukraine operated much as the Israel Lobby operates in the United States. (And we sort-of know the stories of the Bidens’ interest [Joe and Hunter] in Ukraine.)

Conclusion

Germany is dowsing the embers of a twice-vibrant democracy. A war that might have been a small regional war threatens to become a world war, as big liberal-mercantilist (money-focused ‘economically conservative’ and ‘socially liberal’ political classes who are indifferent to unselected genocides and mass-suffering-events) economic powers such as Germany (and the United Kingdom) become less democratic and more bellicose. If we treasure our democratic principles, we should at least take notice.

The Russia-Ukraine War is a mucky border conflict between two countries with a long and intertwined shared history, and with more than enough ‘stirring of the pot’ from outside to convert a regional security dispute into an existential global security threat. It can be settled with a deal that reflects the military situation, rather than by democratically compromised sabre-rattling from Western Europe. After a fluid war in 1950 followed by an extended bloody stalemate – and a change of government in Washington – the 1953 Korean War cease-fire enabled the Republic of Korea (South Korea) to become an economic superpower. An independent capitalist Republic of Ukraine (or, if necessary, West Ukraine) might do the same.

(In that context, we note that Korea’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Syngman Rhee, “refused to sign the armistice agreement that ended the [hostilities], wishing to have the peninsula reunited by force”. Syngman Rhee’s country was saved, though not by him.)

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Germany’s important election last week struggled to make the news cycle, even on Germany’s own Deutsche Welle(DW), Germany’s equivalent of Britain’s BBC. Especially (but not only) in the international media, most of the focus was on a single party (AFD, Alliance for Germany) that was never going to have the most votes and was (almost) never going to become part of the resulting government.

Germany is the world’s third largest national economy, and traditionally dominates the politics of the European Union; an important example of this dominance was the Eurozone financial crisis of the first-half of the 2010s; a crisis that was (unsatisfactorily) resolved, thanks to a problematic and controversial program of fiscal austerity.

At present, Germany, like New Zealand, is experiencing an economic recession. (Provisional annual economic growthwas -0.2% in 2024 and -0.3% in 2023.) The cause is similar, too, in both countries: the same ‘balance the Budget’ mentality that gave the world the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Election Result

The ‘winner’ of the German election was the CDU/CSU Alliance (see Wikipedia for a better presentation of the results), which works a bit like the Liberal/National Coalition in Australia. (The Christian Social Union functions in Bavaria much like Australia’s National Party functions in rural Queensland.) CDU/CSU (like National in New Zealand) comfortably prevailed with 28.5 percent of the vote, entitling that alliance to 33 percent of the seats in the Bundestag (Parliament).

The new Chancellor (equivalent to Prime Minister) will be Friedrich Merz; a 69-year-old version of our own Christopher Luxon, as far as I can tell. He is strongly anti-Putin and pro-Israel. He has come to power well and truly under the international media radar; and will be in a strong position to exert near-absolute power, given that he will always be able to turn to the AFD (who got more votes than the Social Democrats; 20.8%) for support in the Bundestag for any measure that is not palatable to Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats. In the new Parliament, the Greens and the Left merely make up the numbers.

Merz’s Christian Democrats will form a coalition government with the losing SPD (Social Democratic Party, like Labour in New Zealand) who came third with 16.4 percent of the vote; 19 percent of the seats. Together these two parties of the establishment centre hold 52% of the new parliament, despite having less than 45% of the vote. (The outgoing minority government was a centrist coalition of the SPD and the Greens; the election was held early because the ACT-like Liberal Party – the FPD, Free Democrats – withdrew from the coalition. The FPD vote shrunk from 11.4 percent in 2021 to just 4.3 percent of the vote this time.)

The result in Germany proved to be very much like that of the United Kingdom in 2024: a slide in support for the two major parties (‘the establishment centre’), a consolidation of power to the self-same establishment centre, and a shift of that establishment centre to the right. (See my chart in Germany’s stale (and still pale) political mainstream, Evening Report 27 February 2025, for a timeline of decline.) While both countries technically underwent a change of government, in both countries the establishment has entrenched its power, and in both countries the political assumptions of the power centre have shifted to the right.

Clearly this is problematic for democracy, because historically disastrous popular support for the ‘broad church’ parties of the establishment centre has coincided with increased power to those parties, as well as policy convergence between them. Further, based on legislative electoral requirements, neither Germany nor the United Kingdom (nor the United States for that matter) will have a new government until 2029. At a time when a week is a long time in international politics, 208 weeks is an eternity. World War Three, a distinct possibility, may be in its second or third year by then.

Voting System

Germany represents the prototype upon which New Zealand’s MMP voting system is based. There are some differences though, and some recent changes.

Germany calls its all-important ‘party vote’ the ‘second vote’, disguising its importance. It is possible that many German voters do not fully appreciate its significance. The electorate vote is called ‘first vote’, and winners (by a plurality, not necessarily a majority) are elected ‘directly’. The second (party) vote is understood as a top-up vote to ensure proportionality.

Party lists are regional in Germany. And ‘ethnic parties’ may get special privileges.

In one respect the German version is more proportional than the New Zealand version of MMP, in that it no longer allows overhang MPs. (However, the most recent result is not proportional in the important sense that two parties together with less than 45% of the vote have 52% of the seats.) In MMP, one can easily imagine an overhang situation being frequent if the ‘major’ parties, which win most electorates, only get between 16% and 29% of the party vote.

In 2013, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court decided that overhang seats were too big a threat to proportionality. So, they introduced ‘levelling seats’. In effect, it meant that if one party gets an overhang, then all parties get an overhang. The result was, in 2013, that a parliament that should have had 598 members (Deputies) ended up with 631, an effective overhang of 33. In 2017 that effective overhang grew to 111, and to 137 in 2021.

For 2025, they decided to abandon overhang representation altogether, by not guaranteeing direct election through the first vote. And they fixed the size of the Bundestag to 630 Deputies, up from a base-size of 598.

If the new German system was in place in New Zealand in 2023, then two of the Te Pati Māori electorate seats from 2023 would have been forfeit, going instead to second placed candidates; proportionality in 2023 entitled Te Pati Māori to four seats, not the six which they have. However, we should note that, if New Zealand was using the present German version of MMP, there would be no special Māori electorates, but the Māori Party would be exempt the five percent party threshold. Ethnic-privileged parties in Germany are incentivised to focus on the party vote, not the electorate vote. In Germany there is a Danish ethnic party (South Schleswig Voters’ Association) which is exempt the threshold. Its leader, Stefan Seidler, did not win his electorate. But his party got 0.15% of the nationwide vote, meaning it qualified for 0.15% of the 630 places in the Bundestag; one seat, for him.

New Zealand voters seem to have more tactical and strategic political nous than do German voters. Thus, it has been very rare for a party in New Zealand to miss out qualifying for Parliament because of getting between 4% and 5% of the party votes (noting that both countries operate a 5% disqualification threshold). In Germany, party-vote percentages just below 5% are not uncommon. In New Zealand, voters, conscious that they want to play a role in coalition-building, actively help parties near the threshold to get over the line. (Indeed, I voted New Zealand First in 2023, because I was 99.9% sure that the only post-election coalition options would be National/ACT or National/ACT/NZF; I favoured the three-party alternative, so I used my vote strategically to help block a National/ACT government.)

Indeed the latest German result was a bit like the latest New Zealand result, but with a party resembling New Zealand First (BSW) getting 4.972% of the vote, so getting no seats at all. BSW getting just a few more votes would have meant a substantial erosion of the two-party power result which eventuated. It is extremely difficult for new non-ethnic parties to get elected in Germany.

In 2025, two parties scored just under five percent of the vote. As well as the BSW, the (ACT-like) Free Democrats who had been part of the previous government, and who had indeed precipitated the early election, scored 4.3%. Indeed, fifteen percent of the votes were ‘wasted’ – that is, cast for ultimately unsuccessful parties. In New Zealand the wasted vote is typically around four percent. Indeed, this high wasted vote turns out to be a more serious challenge to proportionality in German than uncompensated overhang seats.

Both Germany and New Zealand have the contentious (in New Zealand) ‘electorate MP’ rule; the rule that’s misleadingly dubbed in New Zealand as the ‘coat-tail’ rule. (Misleading, because most MPs come in on the coat-tails of their party leadership, and always have.) In Germany the rule is stricter than in New Zealand. In order to avoid disqualification by getting less than 5% of the party vote, New Zealand requires that the party get one electorate MP. In Germany the rule (initially the same as New Zealand), since 1957 has been a requirement for three electorate MPs. In Germany in 2021, the Left Party got 4.87% of the vote and three electorate MPs; they just squeezed in, on both criteria!

Overall, United States’ Vice-President JD Vance’s pre-election comments about democracy in Germany were valid. German politics continues to exclude the non-establishment parties of both the right and the left, despite support for these parties having been increasing for a while, and now representing the majority of German voters.

Media Framing

German television electoral coverage, if DW is anything to go by, is superficial; indeed, is quite insensitive to the national and local dramas taking place. I watched the coverage live. In the hour before the Exit Poll results were announced, the discussion barely mentioned the potential dramas taking place, despite both the BSW and FDP parties pre-polling only just under the five percent threshold. The state of the economy was mentioned in a perfunctory way; clearly it was not a big issue for the political class on display.

At 6 o’clock exactly, the exit-poll results were read out, as if they were the election result. As indeed they turned out to be, more-or-less; the same as the pre-election polls. The subsequent uninterested attitude towards the actual counting of the votes was disappointing. There had been a bit of this in the 2024 UK election as well; as if the exit poll was the election result. In the UK case, Labour’s actual result (for the popular vote) was well under the exit poll result, while the Conservatives did significantly better than their exit poll tally; those facts, though, were for the nerds and psephologists.

In my observation, early votes and exit polls favour the parties supported by the political class; election day votes much less so. So, in New Zealand in 2023 it was initially looking like there would be a two-party coalition of the right. But, to the attentive, as the night wore on, the National Party percentage fell from 41% to 38%, meaning that NZF would have to be included in any resulting coalition.

I suspected something quite similar would happen in Germany, and I was only partially wrong. The exit poll results, and the subsequent counts, were presented to just one decimal place; indeed, the presentation of the numbers was very poor throughout. So, it was hard to see to what extent BSW was improving as the votes were counted.

In the exit poll, two parties – FPD and BSW – were shown as being on 4.7%, and the AFD was on 19.5%. So, the two 4.7% parties were largely written out of the subsequent discussion. We did see an early concession by the FPD, who – representing a segment of the political class – understood the polling dynamics rather well. And we did see the AFD’s Alice Weidel being asked if she was disappointed to get under 20%. Ms Weidel put on a brave face, but she did seem disappointed. When the votes were actually counted, her party got 20.8% exactly on Weidel’s prior expectations.

BSW was completely ignored. There was simply no interest in the possibility that they might reach the 5% threshold, even when the vote count had them upto 4.9%. In the end BSW reached 4.972%; so close! Out of sight, out of mind! In the official results the BSW were lumped with ‘Other Parties’. The DW election panel were too unaware to make any comments about the party itself, its philosophies, or how its possible success might influence the process of forming a coalition government. (Of particular importance was that, with just a few more votes, BSW might have given Eastern Germany a voice in a three-way coalition government.)

For DW, their perennial concern is the place of Germany within Europe and the World; they had little time to give the outside world a glimpse into the domestic lives and politics of ordinary Germans. And we heard nothing about the ‘ethnic vote’, the privileged Denmark Party notwithstanding. I suspect that many if not most of the recent immigrants who do much of the work in Germany either could not vote or did not vote. The election was about them, not for them; denizens, not citizens.

However, DW did invite on a gentleman who mildly focussed the attention of the discussants by suggesting that one of the priorities of the new Chancellor – Friedrich Merz – would be to acquire nuclear weapons! I don’t think the rest of the world had any prior insights into that; ordinary Germans were probably equally in the dark.

Who is Friedrich Merz? Who knows? It turns out that he dropped out of politics for a while, to play a leading role in BlackRock, the international acquisitions company which until recently owned New Zealand’s SolarZero (refer Update on SolarZero Liquidation by BlackRock, Scoop, 29 January 2025). Our media told us that the election was all about the “far-right” AFD Party; that is, the far non-establishment-right. We in New Zealand heard nothing about the far establishment-right; the shadowy man (or his party). Some now fear Merz will be an out-and-out warmonger. Even Al Jazeera, which can be relied upon to cover many stories about places New Zealand’s media barely touches (and in a bit more depth), had the portraits of Olaf Scholz and Alice Weidel on the screen, on 22 February, the day before the election, despite the certainty that Merz world become the new Chancellor.

In that vein, I heard a German woman interviewed in Christchurch, on RNZ on 25 February. She, disappointed with the election result, spent her whole edited four minutes railing about the AFD, as if the AFD had won. There was no useful commentary, by her or RNZ, of the actual result of Germany’s election.

Are we so shallow that we don’t care; that some of us with the loudest voices only want to rail against a non-establishment party, and to see the democratic support for alternative parties as being somehow anti-democratic?

East Germany

People of a certain age in New Zealand will remember the former East Germany; the DDR, German ‘Democratic’ Republic. Most people in Germany itself will have had knowledge of it, including the Berlin-based political staff of DW who were mostly in their thirties, forties and fifties. But the ongoing issues of Eastern Germany were barely in their mindframes.

In Eastern Germany – the former DDR – (especially outside of Berlin), support for the AFD was close to 40%, for BSW over 10%, and the Left much higher than in Western Germany. In the former East Berlin (which I visited in 1974), the Left seems to have been the most popular party. Support in the East for the establishment parties combined was between 25% and 30%, and with a lower turnout.

BSW, it turns out, is Left on economic policy and Right on social policy. And, in the German discourse, is categorised by the political class as ‘pro-Putin’. If BSW had got 5% of the vote, Merz could have tried to bring them into his government; or Merz might have turned to the Green Party instead of a ‘pro-Putin’ party. But I cannot see even the German Greens being able to govern as a junior partner to a belligerent establishment-right CDU-led government. BSW’s failure to get 5% of the vote may turn out to be one of the great ‘might-have-beens’ of Germany’s future history.

As JD Vance stated, this Eastern German situation poses a danger for democracy in Germany and in Europe. Eastern Germany is where the German state is at its most vulnerable. The majority of voters there have voted for ‘pro-Putin’ parties; and, significantly, parties prioritising the problems of economic failure over the big-politics of extranational power-plays.

The new German government, it would seem, is set to aggravate (or, at best, ignore) the problems of Germany’s ‘near-East’, while setting out to inflame the problems of Europe’s ‘far-East’.

The Debt Brake

This is Germany’s equivalent of Ruth Richardson’s 1994 ‘Fiscal Responsibility Act’ (now entrenched in New Zealand law and lore). This is the major single reason why New Zealand has had so many infrastructure problems this century, and why so many young men and families emigrated to Australia in the 1990s, with some of these emigrants coming back to New Zealand in recent years as ‘501s’.

The Merkel debt-brake is the self-inflicted single major reason why many European economies are in such a mess today; and Germany in particular. Germany is congenitally deeply committed to all kinds of financial austerity, with government financial austerity being the most ingrained. Rather than circulating as it should, money is concentrating. The debt-brake is “a German constitutional rule introduced [in 2009] during the Global Financial crisis to enforce budget discipline and reduce [public] debt loads in the country” (see Berlin Briefing, below).

Germany still has a parliamentary session under the old Parliament, before the new parliament convenes. Michaela Küfner (see Berlin Briefing, below) suggests the possibility that the old “lame duck” Parliament could remove the debt-brake from the German constitution, because she sees the make-up of the new more right-wing parliament as being less amenable to address this ‘elephant in the room’. Seems democratically dodgy to me, even talking about pushing dramatic constitutional legislation through a ‘lame duck’ parliament; like Robert Muldoon, pushing through a two-year parliamentary term for New Zealand in the week after the 1984 election!

(Two-year parliamentary terms are not unknown, by the way; the United States has a two-year term for its Congress. This is almost never mentioned when we discuss the parliamentary term in New Zealand. In the United States at present, there will be many people for whom the 2026 election cannot come fast enough; an opportunity to reign-in Donald Trump.)

Future German relations with the United States

On 27 February (28 Feb, New Zealand time) – before the fiasco in the White House on 28 February – I watched Berlin Briefing on DW. This programme is a regular panel discussion of the political editorship of Deutsche Welle.

The context here is that Friedrich Merz made an important speech the evening after the election; a speech that had the Berlin beltway – “people behind the scenes here in Berlin” – all agog. Merz said: “For me the absolute priority will be strengthening Germany so much so that we can achieve [defence] independence from the United States.”

The discussion proceeded as follows:

“How important is this anchoring in Nato of the idea of the United States as ‘The Great Protector’?” Nina Haase, DW political correspondent: “I don’t think there’s a word, ‘massive’ is not enough; people behind the scenes here in Berlin … they talk about are we going to part with the United States amicably or are we going to become enemies [my emphasis] … Europe has relied on the US so much since the Second World War is completely new thinking; just to prepare for a scenario with, if you will, would-be enemies on two sides; in the East with Russia launching a hybrid attack     and then [an enemy] in the West as well.” They go on to talk about the possible need for conscription in Germany.

The political correspondents were talking like bourgeois brat adult children who had expected that they should be able to enjoy a power-lifestyle underwritten by ‘big daddy’ always there as a financial and security backstop; and just realising that the rug of entitlement might be being pulled from under them. Michaela Küfner (Chief Political Editor of DW) goes on to talk about an “existential threat from the United States”, meaning the withdrawal (and potential enmity) of the great protector. “Like your Rich Uncle from across the ocean turning against you”, she said.

Nina Haase: “Pacifism, the very word, needs to be redefined in Germany … Germans are only now able to understand that you have to have weapons in order not to use them.” She was referring to earlier generations of pacifists (like me) who saw weapons as the problem, not the solution.

Ulrike Franke: “Everything needs to change for everything to stay the same”, basically saying Germany itself may have to pursue domestic Rich Uncle policies to maintain the lifestyles of the (entitled) ten percenters.

Michaela Küfner, towards the end of the discussion: “The AFD is framing [the supporters of] the parties which will make up the coming coalition as the political class who we will challenge”. And she noted, but only at the very end of the long discussion, that the effectively disenfranchised people in Eastern Germany are “a lot more Russia-friendly”.

Maybe Merz has a plan to build employment-rich munitions factories in Eastern Germany, to address both his security concerns and the obvious political discontent arising from unemployment and fast-eroding living standards? But Merz will have to abandon his innate fiscal conservatism before he can even contemplate that; can he do a Hoover to Hitler transition? Rearmament was Hitler’s game; his means to full employment after the Depression.

Implications for Democracy

I sense that Friedrich Merz will become the face of coming German politics, just as Angela Merkel once was, and as Trump and Starmer are very much the faces of government in their countries; becoming – albeit through democratic means – similar to the autocrats that, in Eastern and Middle-Eastern countries, they [maybe not Trump] rail against.

We might note that if we look carefully at World War One and World War Two, the core conflict was Germany versus Russia. Will World War Three be the same? And which side will ‘we’ (or ‘US’) be on? In WW1 and WW2, we were on Russia’s side. (Hopefully, in the future, we can be neutral with respect to other countries’ conflicts.)

Democracy is under strain worldwide. The diminishing establishment-centre – the political and economic elites and the people with secure employment and housing who still vote for familiar major parties – is clinging on to power, and for the time-being remains more powerful than ever in Europe.

In the Europe of the early 1930s, it was the Great Depression as a period of abject political failure that resulted in the suspension of democracy. All the signs are that the same failures of democratic leadership – worldwide from the 1920s – will bring about similar consequences.

For democracies to save themselves, they should bring non-establishment voices to the table. In 2025. Germany will be another important test case, already sowing the seeds of political failure. We should be wary of demonising the far non-establishment-right while lionising the far establishment-right.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Ref.

Background Image courtesy of Nick Minto, Copyright 2024 Nick Minto; photographed November 6, 2024, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

In this episode Paul and Selwyn discuss:

• Why Democrats Lost: Incumbency, Elitism, Class & Alienation, Identity Politics…
• Why Trump Won: Anti-Establishment, Populism, Avatar for the Alienated…
• What to Expect Next: Trump Appointments, Isolationism, Geopolitical Impact & Response…

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE: Paul and Selwyn encourage interaction while live, and encourage their audience to lodge comments and questions. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel and click on notification-bell for an alert for future programmes.

Here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Background image: courtesy of and Copyright Nick Minto 2024. Image taken November 6 2024, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

The LIVE Recording of this podcast will begin today, Monday at 12:45pm November 11, 2024 (NZST) which is Sunday evening, 7:45pm (USEST). Image courtesy of Nick Minto, Copyright 2024 Nick Minto; photographed November 6, 2024, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

In this episode Paul and Selwyn will discuss:

• Why Democrats Lost: Incumbency, Elitism, Class & Alienation, Identity Politics…
• Why Trump Won: Anti-Establishment, Populism, Avatar for the Alienated…
• What to Expect Next: Trump Appointments, Isolationism, Geopolitical Impact & Response…

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE: Paul and Selwyn encourage interaction while live, so feel free to lodge comments and questions, but remember if you do so your interaction may be used in this programme. We recommend that you subscribe to our YouTube channel and click on notification-bell.

Here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Background image: courtesy of and Copyright Nick Minto 2024. Image taken November 6 2024, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

Building upon recent episodes of A View from Afar, Political Scientist Paul G Buchanan and journalist Selwyn Manning discuss The Politics of Desperation. This episode flows on from our discussions about long transitions and the moment of friction.

As the old status quo begins to crumble (under the weight of fraction), political leaders and elites invested in it get increasingly desperate, leading to more dangerous decisions, more acute moments, and, increased chances of mistake, miscalculation and unanticipated backlash.

The Politics of Desperation accentuates an ongoing downward spiral. And, the Politics of Desperation takes form in differing degrees. For some, the risk of losing is merely a dent in the leader’s ego, reputation, and an awakening that voters have moved on from their style of politics.

But for others, a loss will prove to be devastating, for example; should Donald Trump lose his bid to regain the United States presidency, he will face sentencing as a felon and perhaps even face jail time. For Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, a future loss or a collapse of his right-wing coalition would likely see him facing domestic charges and possibly charges laid by the International Criminal Court for his role in the disproportionate use of military might in Israel’s war on Gaza.

So, Paul and Selwyn discuss the examples of the Politics of Desperation from around the world and assess the risks as the world rests on the cusp of an unknown future.

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

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RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

The above chart shows the votes for the principal ‘leftish’ political parties in England from 1992 to 2024. The important thing to note is that vote tallies should be rising over time in any country which has a rising population. England had had a rising population trend, yet the numbers of votes cast for the established centre-left parties have been on a falling trend.

For Labour the situation is worse than it looks. In 1992 Labour was comfortably defeated by Conservative. Yet Labour got a million more votes in 1992 than it did in 2024.

We may blame ‘apathy’ for this situation. Many more people are not voting at all. But apparent apathy is usually a symptom of something else. Ideally, when we vote we are voting for some ideal or somebody. More people vote when they perceive at least one of the options in a positive light. There is another situation which can lead to a high propensity to vote; namely if the existing government is perceived as being so bad that people will vote for whoever they must vote for in order to dismiss the government. This was the situation in England in 2024; yet even that urgency failed to galvanise voters. The total number of votes cast in England was the lowest since 2005, when Labour ‘won’ with 35% of the vote. (In 2024 Labour got 34% of the vote.)

In 2024, the total votes cast for Labour in England fell by nearly a million, after the 2019 election which was disastrous for Labour. Yet the number of seats Labour gained nearly doubled. Clearly this last distortion is a result of the ‘plurality’ voting system used in elections to the Westminster Parliament. But there’s something more important going on. The centre-left is losing favour.

The vote for the Liberal Democrats also fell in 2024, despite that party gaining a huge increase in the number of seats won. Their decline in votes is the result of what is commonly known as tactical voting; in this case it appears that about a million people who would have voted LibDem in an MMP election chose to lend their votes to Labour. (Probably more LibDem supporters than this lent their votes to Labour, because it is also clear that, where the LibDem candidate was better placed to beat the Conservative candidate, many otherwise Labour voters lent their votes to LibDem candidates.

It was this ‘efficient’ and rational vote-lending behaviour that enabled the centre-left to win so many seats. So, while, for once, ‘progressive’ voters were clever this time, the bigger story is the decline of popular support for the centre-left political agenda.

Another feature of the 2024 election is the Palestine-Gaza factor. In many traditionally Labour seats, there were ‘independent’ pro-Palestine candidates who cannibalised the Labour vote; indeed a few of these candidates won their seats.

The other important feature is the rise of the Green Party as a left-wing party winning pro-Palestine votes; especially votes of non-Muslims who are disturbed by what is currently happening in the Levant. For this see the two tables below. The Green Party may have gained ‘critical mass’, being poised to be the new left presence in British politics.

England General Election Results
Votes
	Total	Labour	Conservative	LibDem	Green	other
1992	28,148,506	9,551,910	12,796,772	5,398,293		401,531
1997	26,058,712	11,372,329	8,780,881	4,677,565	60,013	1,167,924
2001	21,870,762	9,056,824	7,705,870	4,246,853	158,173	703,042
2005	22,713,855	8,043,461	8,116,005	5,201,286	251,051	1,102,052
2010	25,085,097	7,042,398	9,931,029	6,076,189	258,954	1,776,527
2015	25,571,204	8,087,684	10,517,878	2,098,404	1,073,242	3,793,996
2017	27,165,789	11,390,099	12,379,200	2,121,810	506,969	767,711
2019	26,909,668	9,152,034	12,710,845	3,340,835	819,751	886,203
2024	24,288,122	8,365,122	6,279,411	3,199,060	1,780,226	4,664,303

England General Election Results
Seats
	Total	Labour	Conservative	LibDem	Green	other
1992	524	195	319	10
1997	529	329	165	34		1
2001	529	323	165	40		1
2005	529	286	194	47		2
2010	533	191	298	43	1
2015	533	206	319	6	1	1
2017	533	227	297	8	1
2019	533	180	345	7	1
2024	543	348	116	65	4	10

Watching that election on UK Sky TV (live on You Tube), one commentator repeatedly mentioned the “efficiency” of Labour, meaning that Labour won many seats on small margins. This so-called efficiency will make Labour very vulnerable in the next election, which, luckily for them, may not be until 2029.

Unless Labour performs exceptionally well, the votes lent to Labour will return to their LibDem homes.

What about the votes Labour lost to Independents and Greens in safe Labour seats? And the votes, Labour lent to winning (and near-winning) LibDem candidates. They are most likely to stay with the Liberal Democrats who will need these votes to fend off Conservative candidates.

The Tories

What of the ‘Tory’ Conservatives? They clearly got trounced; their vote count fell by more than 50% in the 2024 election. They may or may not get votes from people who voted Reform, the biggest of the ‘other’ parties in 2024. A useful strategy for them could be to cultivate the large conservative Muslim vote. A significantly higher proportion of voters in England are now Muslims; that proportion will only grow as Muslim households continue to have more children than the national average. And, Islam is a very conservative religion.

There is a natural fit here, going forward. Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nadhim Zahawi was born in Iraq and is “thought to be a Muslim”. Likewise, another former Conservative Chancellor, Sajid Javid – born to Pakistani parents – “still identifies as being a Muslim”. If the Tories wish to be relevant in England’s future, they will need to adopt a wider political vision that is attractive to non-radical Muslims as well as to conservative people of other faiths. Otherwise, the future of the Right in England may fall to the new Reform Party; such a change has already happened in France.

So, I am predicting that – in 2029, or before – the LibDems may come through the middle, just as Emmanuel Macron’s party did in France in 2017, leaving both Labour and Conservative to play the role of small ‘legacy parties’. Labour’s ‘landslide’ is likely to accelerate, but in the wrong way; indeed, a landslide is actually a disaster.

Note

In this chart and text, I have looked at England only, which is the core of the United Kingdom, but not its entirety. This is because, especially in Scotland and Northern Ireland, other parties play significant roles. In Scotland in 2024, the big story was the crash of the Scottish National Party (SNP). Labour was a beneficiary of that crash. But it is likely that votes lent to Labour by regular SNP voters will not stay with Labour.

______________

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

In November 1928, New Zealand had its own ‘Biden moment’ when the 72-year-old Sir Joseph Ward appeared to promise that, if his party won that year’s election, the New Zealand Government would borrow £70 million in 1 year, as a fiscal super-stimulus that would get New Zealand out of the economic doldrums. In large part as a result of that promise, Ward’s party – United, hitherto in third place – was able to form the next government.

Ward misread his speech notes. One source says the proposed loan was meant to be for 10 years; another source says he meant to say £7 million. Probably both are right, in light of what actually happened in 1929; Ward probably meant to say £7 million over ten years. (The Government borrowed about £2 million in 1929, from the London money market. In 1930 and 1931, the United Kingdom was in a deep financial crisis.)

Joseph Ward was one of the most enigmatic of New Zealand’s political leaders. And, importantly, he was one of the few who were ‘fiscal liberals’; opposite of ‘fiscal conservatives’ like Chris Hipkins and Christopher Luxon. (New Zealand has had comparatively few fiscally liberal Prime Ministers. The most fiscally liberal was undoubtedly Julius Vogel. Two others, who are also household names, were Robert Muldoon and Michael Joseph Savage. Along with John Balance, they were New Zealand’s most ‘progressive’ prime ministers, at least in the sense that Julius Vogel understood that word. But in 1928, Ward was well past his political prime; his ‘promise’ was not an articulation of a new vision.

Joseph Ward and his times – a very short potted history to 1925

Joseph Ward (MP for Awarua, ie Bluff) became New Zealand’s Minister of Finance in 1893, a few weeks after his 37th birthday. He was ‘Colonial Treasurer’ during the country’s most ‘progressive’ period – in the modern sense of that word – prior to that of Savage; following Ballance’s premature death. (Ballance had been both Prime Minister and Treasurer during 1891 and 1892.)

Ward was forced out of Cabinet in 1896 on account of his personal financial situation, and resigned from Parliament in 1897 when he had to file for bankruptcy. But he contested the 1897 by-election, and was re-elected by a wider margin than in the 1896 general election. Ward was reappointed to Cabinet once he had paid off his creditors.

Ward became Prime Minister – and, in what was becoming a tradition, also Finance Minister – in 1906 following Richard Seddon’s death. His government folded in 1912; see my France’s Two-Ballot Voting System, and its New Zealand Antecedent, 12 July 2024. Ward resumed his duties as Finance Minister in the World War 1 coalition government, from 1915 to 1919. Ward lost his seat in the 1919 election; that year Prime Minister Massey was able to re-establish majority government.

In 1923, Ward tried to get back into Parliament; he unsuccessfully stood in the Tauranga by‑election. The 1922 general election had been the first genuinely three-party election. Massey’s Reform Party got 37 seats, Ward’s Liberal Party (now led by Thomas Wilford) got 22 seats; Labour (under Harry Holland, an immigrant [1912] from Australia with Marxist sympathies) got 17 seats. Massey governed with the help of the Liberals, though died in office before the 1925 election.

In 1925, Massey’s Reform Party, now lead by Gordon Coates, swept to victory. One of the Liberal’s small caucus of 11 MPs was Joseph Ward, now MP for Invercargill. The Liberal Party had become New Zealand’s third party; suffering a parallel downfall in the 1920s to Lloyd-George’s Liberals in the United Kingdom, and for the same reason – the rise of the proletariat and its own Labour Party.

1925 to 1931: Crisis Years in New Zealand

It was all downhill for the Coates’ government in 1926, and especially 1927. New Zealand suffered from a triple-financial-whammy: the return of the British pound to the gold standard at an over-valued exchange rate, the British general strike which paralysed Great Britain’s seaborne trade, and a significant downturn in the terms of trade (ie relative prices) of agricultural and pastoral products vis-à-vis manufactures. Additionally for the labour market, it was a period of technological unemployment; marked in New Zealand in particular by the revolution of machine milking on dairy farms.

1927 was a year of wholesale bankruptcy of farmers, and became the biggest year of emigration since the 1888 ‘exodus’; especially emigration to Australia, and migration of young job-seekers from the farms to the cities. However, Australia suffered the same triple-whammy, though not as intensively as New Zealand.

In 1928, Australians and others were coming to New Zealand. It was a crisis in both countries. In New Zealand in 1928 there was a National Industrial Conference; the main conclusion was that the apparent and significant rise in unemployment was mainly due to migrants and machines. (Has much changed since then?)

This was the backdrop for the 1928 election. The Liberal Party was fighting for its survival. It hired a very capable campaign manager, Albert Davy. It changed its name to United. And it chose Sir Joseph Ward to be its leader. Then, thanks in part to Joe Ward’s ‘Joe Biden moment’, United ‘won’ the election; it gained more seats than any other party, once four ‘independent Liberals’ were included in the count. United formed a Government with Labour support. Ward was Prime Minister and Finance Minister.

Labour under Harry Holland, with more seats than it had ever had, was at the ‘power table’. Holland has been New Zealand’s only ever ‘far-Left’ political leader in a position of power.

The dynamic didn’t work. While 1929 was a good year for New Zealand, in the midst of many bad years, Ward’s health deteriorated. And he had to switch to Coates’ Reform Party to gain the confidence of the House. This moment represents the real beginnings of the National Party.

Ward died early in 1930, with his earnest and conservative Deputy – George Forbes – taking over as both Prime Minister and Minister of Finance. United was lean on talent and experience, remembering that in 1928 they only had 11 MPs.

The performance of the minority United government in 1930 and 1931 matched its surviving talent. They sleep-walked into the global Great Depression, which hit New Zealand in around August 1930, later than in most countries. In 1931 they ‘saved money’ by cancelling the five-yearly census.

In the 1931 election, United and Reform went to the electorate as the ‘Coalition’, and won comfortably against a fiscally conservative far-left Labour Party. In the UK, a similarly conservative Labour Party with ‘Left’ principles but not practice was in the process of collapsing.

Once again (ie after his 1925-1928 failures), Reform’s William Downie Stewart junior, New Zealand’s dogmatic precursor to Ruth Richardson and Roger Douglas – a ‘classical liberal’ – became Finance Minister. Forbes, as sitting Prime Minister, stayed on, becoming New Zealand’s least-inspiring political leader

The Great Depression deepened in New Zealand, until Downie Stewart lost a political arm-wrestle with his Reform Party leader Gordon Coates, in January 1933. The New Zealand economy bottomed out in the summer of 1932/33, after Coates won his battle to devalue the New Zealand pound.

Summary

Joseph Ward’s ‘Biden moment’ bisected the 1925 to 1933 period, enabling 1929 and most of 1930 to be relatively good years for New Zealand in the midst of a disastrous run of circumstance compounded by the unbending economic liberalism of William Downie Stewart, one of New Zealand’s worst-ever Ministers of Finance.

Today, we could learn from the failings of fiscal conservatism in those years, and the brief relief gained during Joseph Ward’s brief ‘Lazarus’ administration.

Additional References:

https://nzhistory.govt.nz/people/sir-joseph-ward

https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2w9/ward-joseph-george

https://nzhistory.govt.nz/culture/the-1920s/1928

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/books/ALMA1929-9917504153502836-The-remarkable-life-story-of-Sir Joseph Ward

https://www.odt.co.nz/opinion/today-history-nzs-most-shocking-election-result

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

The Trump Assassination Attempt, Security Failures, The Politics and What Happens Next? – Firstly, in this episode of A View from Afar, political scientist and former Pentagon analyst, Dr Paul Buchanan, provides us a preliminary assessment of the assassination attempt on former United States president Donald Trump. And then Paul and Selwyn assess what impact this crime will have on the US Presidential election campaign.

At this juncture, it’s important to be clear, to achieve a robust analysis of the crime that occurred while Trump was speaking at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, it will require a thorough assessment of eye witness accounts, details of the supposed gunman, his background, associations, potential motivations – and importantly a deep assessment of the role of the security agencies.

To determine a clear and probable account of what happened in Pennsylvania this weekend, we would need all of that information, and then to apply it against any variances and/or avoidances by those involved or associated with investigating the events. But clearly, much of that information is not yet available to us.

However, there is enough information for us to consider a preliminary assessment of how satisfactory, or otherwise, the security arrangements were for Trump at this rally.

So, with that said; today Paul and Selwyn examine:

• How could an assassin get inside a security parameter, and in to a position with direct line of sight to his target Donald Trump?
• And specifically, while the gunman was outside the immediate venue, it would appear the shooter’s location was within the security parameters, a position obvious to him as a prime area, with direct line of sight to his intended target.
• So why wouldn’t that fact be obvious to the US security services who were responsible for ensuring the parameters were safe and clear?
• And, importantly too, what are the political implications of this assassination attempt?
• For example; does this assassination attempt accentuate Trump’s mythology as an invincible born to rule leader? And as such, draw contrast to the incumbent US President Joe Biden’s frailty?

In this regard, Paul and Selwyn assess what is likely to happen next?

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

• Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

The Trump Assassination Attempt, Security Failures, The Politics and What Happens Next? – Firstly, in this episode of A View from Afar, political scientist and former Pentagon analyst, Dr Paul Buchanan, will provide us a preliminary assessment of the assassination attempt on former United States president Donald Trump.

At this juncture, it’s important to be clear…

To achieve a robust analysis of this crime that occurred while Trump was speaking at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, it will require a thorough assessment of eye witness accounts, details of the supposed gunman, his background, associations, potential motivations – and importantly a deep assessment of the role of the security agencies.

To determine a clear and probable account of what happened in Pennsylvania this weekend, we would need all of that information, and to apply it against any variances and/or avoidances by those involved or associated with investigating the events.

But clearly, much of that information is not yet available to us.

However, there is enough information for us to consider a preliminary assessment of how satisfactory, or otherwise, the security arrangements were for Trump at this rally.

So, with that said; today we will examine:

• How could an assassin get inside a security parameter, and in to a position with direct line of sight to his target… Donald Trump?
• And specifically, while the gunman was outside the immediate venue, it would appear the shooter’s location was within the security parameters, a position obvious to him as a prime area, with direct line of sight to his intended target.
• So why wouldn’t that fact be obvious to the US security services who were responsible for ensuring the parameters were safe and clear?
• And, importantly too, what are the political implications of this assassination attempt?
• For example; does this assassination attempt accentuate Trump’s mythology as an invincible born to rule leader? And as such, draw contrast to the incumbent US President Joe Biden’s frailty?

In this regard, Paul and I will assess what is likely to happen next?

Live Audience: Remember, if you are joining us live via the social media platforms, feel free to comment as we can include your comments and questions in this programme.

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

• Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

The recent French elections delivered an entirely predictable result; although few in the mainstream media actually predicted it. Instead, the pre-election narrative was that the dastardly ‘far right’ was heading for a win, and that a win for Rally France would presage some kind of disaster for democracy (even bigger, potentially, than the disaster being played out in the United States). And then, after the votes were counted, it seemed that the ‘oddball’ French voting system won the day by delivering the Left in a contest that had been presented as Centre versus Right.

The French two-ballot voting system, used in France’s Fifth Republic (1958 constitution) is a variant of the Australian preferential system, and the multi-ballot systems used for electing presidents and leaders of political parties. One of the earliest countries to use the simple two-ballot electoral system was Maoriland New Zealand – Maoriland was once the preferred indigenous name for New Zealand – in 1908 and 1911.

The French system has one complicating quirk that distinguishes it from its New Zealand antecedent, and that’s what allowed the Rally France (“far right”) party/alliance to (disingenuously) claim that it was robbed in last Sunday’s final vote.

The simple two-ballot system – adopted by New Zealand for the 1908 election – is simply the ‘first past the post’ plurality system (FPP, still used by United Kingdom, United States, and Canada) but with a second round election in electorates for which one candidate failed to gain a majority of votes.

Multi-Ballot Voting

A purest multi-ballot system would have up to four rounds of voting in an electorate with five candidates; after each round the lowest-polling candidate would be eliminated. Thus, the final round would be a simple run-off between the two surviving candidates. We see this system used, ubiquitously, in ‘Reality TV’ shows.

The two advantages of multi-balloting are, one, that it eliminates the ‘vote-splitting’ which is the bane of the FPP system; vote-splitting occurs when two or more candidates occupy a similar place on the political spectrum, to the potential detriment of all those allied candidates. And, two, that multi-balloting enables voters to reflect before making their final choice, knowing where other voters’ preferences lie, and therefore knowing who the real contestants are. Thus, early ballots (especially the first ballot) efficiently serve the same purpose as today’s political polls.

Preferential voting is a compressed version of the multi-ballot system, which eliminates the vote-splitting problem, but fails to address the need for advance information about the actual prospects of each candidate. A vote for someone who has no realistic chance of winning is commonly called a ‘wasted vote’. Preferential voting overcomes this disadvantage if there are reliable political polls published ahead of election day. The problem though, in systems fully based on single-member constituencies – France, UK, USA (Congress and Senate), Canada, Australia – is that most polling is done on the nationwide popular vote, with little reliable polling at electorate-level.

The two-ballot system is a cut-down version of the multi-ballot system, which avoids the cost and potential tedium of having more than two rounds of voting. In its pure New Zealand (1908-1911) form, it eliminates all candidates except the two leaders from the first round. We note that France and a number of other countries (eg Iran, in its recent election) use simple two-ballot elections to vote for their presidents.

France

France, for its Parliament, uses a variation that is confusing to most people outside of France and also to many people in France. Under two-party politics – where, in most electorates, only two candidates are genuine contenders – the French system works like the former New Zealand system – to eliminate obvious also-rans. But in three party politics – or ‘three-alliance politics’, as we now see in France (strictly three alliances plus a still-popular centre-right party) – the simple two-ballot system could enforce the elimination of some genuine contenders.

Thus, in France, it is possible for three or more candidates to make it to the second ballot; meaning that, even on the final ballot, vote-splitting would still be a problem. In the 2024 France election, and for the first time ever, three candidates qualified for the second round ballot in most electorates.

To avoid vote-splitting, in the few days after the first round ballot ‘horse-trading’ is encouraged and as a result many candidates qualifying for the second round withdraw their candidacy. This is sensible practical politics; the candidates themselves work out who is likely to come third, and – especially if the most disliked candidate is in the first-round lead – the likely third-placed candidate formally withdraws from the electoral race. What in the end happens, in most electorates, is that the second ballot ends up exactly as it would have been in the New Zealand 1908-1911 system.

In France, once the second-round ballots are finalised – that is, before the votes are cast – the result is predictable in most electorates. Thus it was clear two days before the election – that is, on 5 July 2024 – that the Left alliance would be headed for a narrow ‘win’, where the winner is defined as the alliance or party with more successful candidates than each of their rivals.

Of course the Left didn’t really win. President Macron’s second-place centrist alliance has all the influence in any minority administration that forms, because the Centre will be able to play off both the Left and the Right (and noting that the Right has more MPs than the Left, given that the Right is made up both of Marine Le Pen’s’ far-right’ alliance and the centre-right ‘Les Républicains’ party). As a concession to the Left, President Macron is likely to choose a Prime Minister (PM) from the right of the Left. To me, the obvious candidate for PM would be former president François Hollande. Macron came to prominence in French politics as Hollande’s technocratic finance minister (2012-2017).

In the context of efficient ‘horse-trading’ that may take place when there are more than two contestants in the final ballot, the United Kingdom election of 4 July was an interesting case study. There was significantly more so-called ‘tactical voting’ in the UK than usual, with the main tactical goal being to create an informal alliance against the ‘Tory’ Conservative Party. Thus we saw Liberal Democrat (LibDem) voters ‘lend’ their votes to Labour in most constituencies, while in about 70 constituencies very many former Labour voters chose the LibDems this time.

What happened in New Zealand in the 1900s?

In 1905, under FPP, Richard Seddon’s Liberal Party got 53.1% of the vote, and 58 out of 80 seats. Seddon died in 1906, replaced by Joseph Ward. It was a time of party formation, with the Opposition then being William Massey’s Conservatives. It was a time of increasing numbers of three-way electoral contests in which credible Independent candidates might split-the-vote, allowing rival rather than allied candidates to win.

In 1908, under the two-ballot system, Ward raised the Liberal vote to 58.7% but won fewer seats (50 instead of 58 in 1905). 22 of the 80 electorates required second ballots.

The main drama happened in 1911. In the final vote, Ward’s Liberal Party won 34.2% of the vote and 33 seats, Massey’s conservative Reform Party got 37 seats with 33.4% of the vote. The (literally ‘new’) Labour Party got 4 seats with 11.5% of the vote. Simple maths tells us that 6 seats were won by others, including Independents.

The action that mattered was in the Kaipara electorate. Gordon Coates, running as an ‘Independent Liberal’ came second to the official Liberal, on the first ballot. Once the Reform candidate was eliminated, Coates gained most of the eliminated candidate’s votes, enabling him on the second ballot to defeat John Stallworthy, the official Liberal candidate. Massey spotted Coates as a potential ally in negotiations to resolve this ‘hung parliament’; Coates differed from official Liberal policy in favouring freehold tenure for farmers, otherwise he was a Liberal. Massey’s Reform party was founded as a way for the Conservatives to emphasise their preference for freehold over leasehold land tenure.

After the election, Joseph Ward tried to form a minority government, but was unable to win a vote of confidence. Nor could Massey. A Liberal minority government persevered through most of 1912, under the Prime Ministership of Thomas Mackenzie.

It was Massey’s head-hunting of Gordon Coates that enabled Massey to defeat Mackenzie in a confidence vote late in 1912, and for Massey himself then to form a minority government; a government which maintained the confidence of the House until the 1914 election. The 1914 election was held in the early years of World War 1; Massey (with Coates) won comfortably but not comprehensively. Massey was arguably helped by his action, in early 1913, to revert the electoral system to the FPP which older New Zealanders knew but never really loved.

My final observation here is to note that Coates succeeded Massey as Prime Minister when Massey died (in office) in 1925. Coates went on to be a failed Prime Minister (his party voted out into third place in 1928); though, in the mid-1930s, he was the Minister of Finance who did more than anyone else to bring New Zealand out of the Great Depression. (He even sought advice from, among others, alleged ‘Communist’ economists; as a result, he precipitated the split in his conservative coalition party which brough Labour and Michael Joseph Savage to power in 1935, thanks to the vagaries of FPP.)

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

And at a macro level, Paul and Selwyn assess how ‘Post-Colonial Blowback’ is a power giving rise to the Global South and its worldwide influence in global geopolitics.

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Political scientist Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning examine: The United States and how the world is engaging with it geopolitically.

Specifically, Paul and Selwyn analyse what has changed in this regard in 2024, and consider whether some leaders of global, regional, and even small powers are preparing for the possibility of a second Donald Trump presidency.

And, importantly, at this juncture, they assess whether some leaders who are central to conflict in the world today, regard the Biden Administration as having entered a lame-duck period.

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RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

It’s been a tumultuous time in politics in recent months, as the new National-led Government has driven through its “First 100 Day programme”. During this period there’s been a handful of opinion polls, which overall just show a minimal amount of flux in public support for the various parties in Parliament – the levels of support for each party are roughly where they were at the last election.

Yet beneath the steady “party vote” numbers are some further polling results that should worry the new National-led administration. It appears that Christopher Luxon’s Government is not receiving the usual “honeymoon” period normally gifted to the fresh faces controlling the Beehive.

The IPSOS poll for February

The most concerning survey result for the Government comes today from the IPSOS polling company, which released its latest “Issues Monitor” report, showing that New Zealanders rate the performance of the new Government at only 4.6 out of 10. You can see the full report here: IPSOS: 23rd Ipsos NZ Issues Monitor Feb 2024

The polling company asked 1000 New Zealanders: “Overall, how would you rate the government for its job in the last 6 months from 0 to 10, where 0 means ‘abysmal’ and 10 means ‘outstanding’?” The 4.6/10 result is the mean average answer.

IPSOS reports that this poor score is very similar to the lows recorded for the last government. The Labour Government received its highest score of 7.6 in July 2020, but by August 2023 it had dropped to 4.5. You can see the changing scores for the various governments, since 2017, in the chart below from the IPSOS report:

What is also interesting is to look at the breakdown of the proportions that gave the Government a high score (7-10/10), a mid-score (4-6/10) or a low score (0-3/10). In the latest survey, 37 per cent of respondents gave a low score, which was the highest proportion since the survey began in July 2017, and the report authors label a “significant” increase. Meanwhile, 30 per cent gave a high score, and 29 per cent gave a mid-score. This suggests a rather polarised electorate.

Political scientist Grant Duncan comments today on the latest result: “We’d normally expect a ‘honeymoon’ boost in a new government’s rating, if only due to people feeling glad about a change. But the Luxon government was mired in controversy even before the coalition agreements were drafted” – see: It’s official: Luxon missed out on a honeymoon

Duncan suggests that the latest poor score might be a result of the Treaty and ethnicity debates of February: “The IPSOS poll was run in late February, after the country had gone through a lot of debate and angst, thanks to ACT’s proposed Treaty bill and to controversial policies such as the disestablishment of the Māori Health Authority”.

Luxon responded to the latest poll today on TVNZ’s Breakfast by saying he was “not too hung up on polls” and he pointed out that “for 15 of the 20 areas of concern raised by New Zealanders in the study, respondents backed the National Party’s ability to deal with them” – see Felix Desmarais’ No honeymoon: Govt performance 4.6 out of 10 so far – poll

The IPSOS survey also showed the following top five issues of concern for the public:

1. Inflation / cost of living 59% (-3)
2. = Housing / price of housing 33% (+2)
3. = Healthcare / hospitals 33% (+1)
4. Crime / law and order 27% (-10)
5. The economy 25% (+1)

The Talbot Mills poll

Yesterday, the latest Talbot Mills poll result was published by BusinessDesk, showing the following party vote support:

• National: 38% (-)
• Labour: 28% (-1)
• Greens: 14% (+2)
• Act: 8% (+1)
• NZF: 6% (-1)

More concerning for the Government was the “preferred PM” result, which had Christopher Luxon on 24 per cent (down 3 points), and only slightly above Chris Hipkins, on 23 per cent. The last National prime minister to perform this poorly was Jenny Shipley, who polled only 22 per cent 26 years ago in 1998 – one year before National lost the election to Helen Clark’s Labour Party.

The mood of the electorate has also soured. When asked if the country is headed in the right or wrong direction, 48 per cent said it was on the “wrong track”, which was up seven percentage points since February. Those who said New Zealand on the “right track” was down three points to only 40 per cent.

This poll was apparently carried out for Talbot Mills’ corporate clients, and wasn’t meant for publication, but you can read about it in Pattrick Smellie’s article, Christopher Luxon struggling to connect: leaked poll (paywalled)

Smellie also reports that “more than two-thirds of those polled named the cost of living as one of their three biggest concerns. That dwarfed the next three worries: health, crime and housing, which were all nominated roughly equally”. Furthermore, “almost three-quarters of voters opposed ‘semi-automatic weapons being made legal again’, at 73%.”

The Taxpayers Union Curia poll

Eleven days ago the Taxpayers Union Curia Poll also came out, which showed some broadly similar results. The Herald’s Thomas Coughlan reported on it: “The mood of the country appears to have soured on the Government. After a couple of months in which more Kiwis felt the country was on the ‘right track’, the right track-wrong track indicator tipped into negatives again, with net 3 per cent of people thinking NZ was on the wrong track. More people disapprove of the Government than approve of it. A net 3.9 per cent of people disapprove of the Government, a shift of 8.4 points on last month’s poll” – see: Latest poll: Christopher Luxon’s popularity crashes after allowance blunder, now trails Chris Hipkins

Also, in terms of Luxon’s favourability, the results were bad news. His net favourability had dropped 16 points to -5 per cent, behind that of Hipkins on +2 per cent. However, the other party leaders in government fared much better, with David Seymour up 6 points to -8 per cent and Winston Peters up 10 points to -22 per cent.

Thomas Coughlan points out that the Curia poll had been carried out at the time that Luxon had endured very negative media coverage over his accommodation entitlement.

Here are the party vote figures:

• National: 37.4% (-2.2)
• Labour: 25.3% (-2.6)
• Greens: 11.3% (+2.3)
• Act: 10% (-3.7)
• NZF: 7.4% (-+2.4)
• TPM: 2.5% (+0.2)

Also in March, the Roy Morgan poll – which receives less media publicity, due to this Australian company not belonging to the New Zealand agreement on survey methodology – also had broadly similar results, albeit with Labour on even lower figure:

• National: 35.5% (-2.5)
• Labour: 21.5% (-0.5)
• Greens: 15.5% (-)
• Act: 12% (+4.5)
• NZF: 7% (+1.5)
• TPM: 4% (-0.5)
• TOP: 2.5% (-2)

The lack of a honeymoon for the new prime minister was also discussed last month by 1News’ Justin Hu, who has looked at what happened when Helen Clark, John Key and Jacinda Ardern became PM: “Back in 2000, Helen Clark enjoyed a 13-point bump in preferred prime minister polling… Nine years later, following Clark’s defeat, successor John Key rose in support from 40% to 51% as preferred prime minister in the February following the 2008 election… Following the swearing-in of Jacinda Ardern’s 2017 coalition government, she also posted a 10-point lift in her preferred prime minister numbers by the following February” – see: Luxon’s popularity low compared to other first-term PMs

Political scientist Lara Greaves is reported in this article as putting the problem for Luxon mostly down to Winston Peters and David Seymour occupying much of the spotlight since the coalition was formed. She says that having “two very strong deputy prime ministers with quite strong personalities” was affecting the public’s perception of Luxon.

Since then, both Peters and Seymour have only made their presence even stronger and their controversies bigger. It’s hard to see how any of this is going to help Luxon push up his government’s report card above 4.6/10.

Dr Bryce Edwards

Political Analyst in Residence, Director of the Democracy Project, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington.

When countries’ national elections are closely fought, it means that the median voters critically determine the parliamentary or congressional outcome. But, though depending to a considerable extent on the prevailing political culture, the centre-of-gravity of the resulting government may be far from that median usually ‘centrist’ position of the voters.

The Aotearoan case

Aotearoa achieved something very rare in 1992 and 1993; a complete change of electoral system. Aotearoans were fed up with extremist winner-takes-all politics, where the ‘winner’ almost never got a majority of votes; and where the outcome in non-battleground electoral districts was purely academic, though ‘academic’ in the best sense of that word.

Ironically, the change was initiated by New Zealand’s ‘right-wing’ government of the last half century; the Bolger-Richardson National government which edged out the Lange-Douglas Labour government for this ‘honour’. (In both cases, the Prime Minister was comparatively ‘centrist’, but with extreme economic liberals as Ministers of Finance, although Roger Douglas was a relative latecomer to the cause of neoliberalism. In a sense, Prime Minister Jim Bolger did a ‘David Cameron’; expecting to put the matter of proportional representation to rest, just as Cameron expected his referendum in 2016 to dispel agitation for British exit ‘Brexit’ from the European Union.) We may also note that the Shipley-Birch government in 1998 and 1999 was very right-wing, having – in 1997 and 1998 – ousted both Prime Minister Bolger and Treasurer Winston Peters; in this case it was Prime Minister Shipley who was seen as more right-wing than Finance Minister Birch.

(There is some chatter – eg Chris Trotter, Nothing Left without Labour, 19 Dec 2023 – about as to whether the new government of Aotearoa New Zealand will be its “most right” ever. Time will tell of course, and there are alarming similarities showing between present Finance Minister Nicola Willis and 1990-1994 Finance Minister Ruth Richardson. For the last 100 years, I would rate the early Depression governments from 1930 to January 1933 as the most right-wing. This period from 1930, which commenced with the death in office of Prime Minister Joseph Ward, includes a Depression election at the end of 1931; an election which saw Labour, already in Opposition, trounced. In 1930 and 1932, Prime Minister George Forbes was also Finance Minister. In 1932 the extreme economic liberal, William Downie Stewart, was Finance Minister. In 1933, as in 1994, the government turned towards the political centre after the ousting of Stewart. The catalyst in 1933 was a critical change to monetary policy; the devaluation of the New Zealand pound which set New Zealand onto its eventual recovery path. Today’s byword for the 1932 and 1992 governments was ‘austerity’; we in Aotearoa sense – palpably – that austerity is also how the mid-2020s will be remembered.)

The hope in 1992 was that proportionally-elected governments would be loose coalitions, and that all parties in Parliament would contribute to some extent to the governance of New Zealand. And indeed we have seen that at times, with the ‘left-wing’ Green Party contributing to some policy delivery under a centre-right National-led government, and with the then radically-centrist Māori Party accepting the Prime Minister’s invitation to contribute formally to the governance process in the early 2010s.

The political culture in New Zealand – or at least the elite political culture – remained committed to binary politics; to the adversarial politics of Governments and Oppositions shouting at each other across a political theatre designed precisely for that kind of politics. As Peter Dunne – former leader of the former centrist United Party, a man who held the balance of power in three Parliaments this century – once said, the parties form into (or are formed into) “job lots” of the Left and the Right. In New Zealand’s history since 1996 of proportionally-elected governments, only three successful parties have resisted pre-election binarisation, and each only partially so: United, New Zealand First, and the previous incarnation of Te Pāti Māori (generally known then as the Māori Party).

As 2023 unfolded, it was looking like two distinct job lots would be fighting it out: National and Act as the Right; and Labour, Green and Te Pāti Māori as the Left. National and Labour were understood to be quasi-centrist neoliberal parties with nearly identical macroeconomic policies: fiscal conservatism laced with monetary austerity. But they had different political cultures: whereas National still represented the Old Right Elites (and rural New Zealand in general), Labour’s power base was the expanding New Left Elites, including the New Māori Elite. Elite politics – the politics of optics over substance, the politics of wilful neglect of the disadvantaged, and the politics of health and education mandates – was becoming increasingly adversarial, indeed becoming visceral.

Out of this cocktail of despair, Winston Peters’ nationalist New Zealand First Party – sometimes semi-radical, genuinely centrist – re-emerged, to the chagrin of the entire political class. But it New Zealand First had to be attached to the National-Act job lot. Peters and Labour had ruled each other out in 2022; and in a way that could not easily be undone. So one of the election campaign’s main ‘gotcha’ games was for the mainstream political media to force National leader Christopher Luxon to explicitly admit New Zealand First into his job lot of Parties, and then to blame Luxon’s ‘moment of weakness’ for Peters’ concurrent rise in the political polls.

The political polls had always indicated that the 2023 election would be a close – even ‘knife-edge’ – contest between the two designated job lots. The voters’ quandary was how to choose a moderate rather than an extreme government, given the relatively extreme positions on the left-right spectrum being taken by Te Pāti Māori, Green and Act. The quandary was exacerbated by the voters’ wish for a non-austere government, when both Labour, National and Act were firmly committed to fiscal austerity, and there was no intellectual commitment from Green or Māori towards an alternative to fiscal austerity.

(2023 was looking like an MMP – proportional – rerun of the 1931 and 1990 elections. We might note here that Joseph Ward’s United Party – unconnected to Peter’s Dunne’s more recent United – was a centrist party in the 1920s, the remnants of Richard Seddon’s Liberals. And, or at least it’s commonly believed, that Ward – then 72 years old, and perceived by some as a bit doddery – won the 1928 election because he misread his speech notes, and promised to raise a 70 million pound loan, when it’s believed he meant £7 million. Fiscal non-austerity is popular among the non-elite; and 1927 had been a terrible year for the New Zealand economy, under the public financial management of the fiscal ultra-conservative William Downie Stewart. More farmers walked off their farms in 1927 than in the Great Depression of the early 1930s.)

There is a party of the ‘radical centre’ in New Zealand – TOP, the Opportunities Party – but it never stood a chance of breeching the five-percent party-vote threshold in 2017, 2020, or 2023. And even TOP has deradicalised, presumably to edge closer to the mainstream fiscal narrative. I heard no mention from TOP or anyone else, in 2023, of a Universal Basic Income; a UBI, once TOP’s cornerstone policy, is counter-elite, hated equally by the elite left and the elite right. The message in 2023, to non-elite voters, was to vote for the elite job-lot they detested least, rather than to risk ‘wasting’ one’s vote on a party that couldn’t make the threshold. Since the first proportional election is 1996, no genuinely new party has made it past the five-percent barrier. (The ‘minor parties’ are all offshoots of ‘major parties’: the Green Party and Jim Anderton’s Progressive Party were offshoots of the Alliance, itself formed as New Labour, a Labour Party offshoot; Act was another offshoot of Labour; New Zealand First was an offshoot of National; Te Pāti Māori was an offshoot of Labour; United was an offshoot of both National and Labour.)

New Zealand voters have developed two techniques for moderating the left-right job-lot fait-accompli. They could tactically switch to United (as they did in 2002) or New Zealand First (as in 2005 and 2017) or the Māori Party (as they might have done in 2008 or 2017, but didn’t). The other possible tactic is for supporters of one of the ‘major parties’ – National or Labour – to switch to the other as a way of minimising the input in government of the minor party which they dislike the most. We saw that in 1999, 2008, and 2020. (In 2020, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called this other-party supporters “lending their vote” to Labour.)

What can happen is that a close ‘job-lot’ outcome – a close binary outcome between Left and Right – can increase the leverage in government of a small but extremist coalition partner. Act played that role of fear-nemesis to the Left, whereas Green is the traditional fear-nemesis of the Right. This is what is really meant by the ‘tail wagging the dog’; when an extremist party – or at least an adjudged extremist party – has excessive leverage, especially in close-election cases when the median voter supports a party like TOP.

Imagine if this present New Zealand government did not have its New Zealand First “hand-brake”, as Winston Peters accurately paints his intermittent role in New Zealand’s post-1993 proportional governance culture. That ‘hand-brake’ culture hasn’t developed to the point where the political class would be able to countenance a ‘grand-coalition’ of National and Labour. Indeed the median voter in New Zealand is not a bland centrist; not an elitist centrist. A bland-grand-coalition would only have the optics of centrist politics; it would not at all be in touch with non-elite voters.

Very few Prime Ministers in New Zealand have found a centrist position that’s in touch with middle New Zealand. Michael Joseph Savage did. Richard Seddon did. Joseph Ward did, briefly and too some extent inadvertently; but Ward wasn’t a fiscal conservative. And, perhaps belatedly, nostalgia is reviving the legacy of Robert Muldoon; he who helped New Zealand get through its second worst global economic crisis. On RNZ’s The Panel a few weeks ago, I heard someone suggest that Muldoon was New Zealand’s last “socialist” Prime Minister. To the great surprise of that show’s host, people texted in, in full agreement with that ‘last socialist’ proposition, and in a distinctly approving way.

Despite proportional representation, New Zealand’s political culture favours unpopular governments, and adversarial processes of rhetoric and repeal. Aotearoa New Zealand, one of the most privately indebted countries in the world can only elect governments which don’t pursue a ‘duty-of-care’ approach towards ordinary Aotearoans; the main parties are averse to spending money on social-wage services or universal public income support. Indeed, since 1994, ‘fiscal responsibility’ – read ‘wilful neglect’ – is embedded in the Public Finance Act; an Act which I would argue has become central to New Zealand’s de facto constitution.

To understand a political culture, comparisons need to be made with other political jurisdictions, with other sovereignties.

United States

The United States’ ‘parliament’ is Congress, elected on a two-year electoral cycle. Sometimes – like now – two years seems too long. The United States’ polity represents the ‘mother of all adversarial cultures’.

In the 2022 election, Congress flipped, giving the Republican Party a narrow win. That Republican Congress is significantly more extreme than just about any previous Congress, in large part because of the narrowness of its majority. This situation mainly arises because American culture has become so adversarial that the large Democrat minority voted with the Republican extremists to oust the Republican moderate – Kevin McCarthy – from his role as Speaker. (Speaker is the nearest to a Prime Minister that exists in the American system.) The result was an impasse of several weeks, and the eventual election of a Speaker – Mike Johnson – who is a conservative hardliner who endorsed the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump really won the 2020 presidential election.

In the United States system, close elections lead to more extreme outcomes, in complete contravention of the voters’ voice.

Israel

Israel has a proportional system, which allows for a much wider range of political parties than does New Zealand’s ‘MMP’ proportional system. The last two elections have been very close, with its multiparty ‘job lots’ only partly determined by the left-right political spectrum. Personality politics plays a big part.

Two elections ago the ‘man who would be king’ of Israel – Bejamin Netanyahu – was disempowered by an assortment of parties across the spectrum, including a small party supported by Palestinian Israelis. The temperature in this Levantine ‘powder-keg’ turned down a notch. But not for long. In the next election, with a sliver of a margin, Netanyahu was able to resume power by turning to the small ultra-Neozionist rump of his Parliament. The result is ‘history-in-the-present’, as we witness the brutal programmes to ethnically clear Gaza, and to squeeze the Palestinians out of any form of meaningful life in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. To maintain power during this electoral cycle, Netanyahu has no choice but to fall in line with his government’s most extreme voices. For perhaps most Israelis, the next election cannot come soon enough.

Again, given the prevailing political culture, close elections can lead to extreme outcomes.

France

In France – a European exception, without proportional representation – there has been a complete turnover of major parties. France’s equivalents of National and Labour both died in the 2010s. Neither seems capable of resurrection. In their place is a centre party – Renaissance – that looks like a mini-grand-coalition, a populist right party, and a new leftwing alliance. There are no multiparty job-lots as such; rather each party itself is a coalition of factions.  A degree of stability is ensured by the two-ballot system; a system that was used in Aotearoa New Zealand in 1908 and 1911, but abolished in 1913 by one of New Zealand’s most right-wing governments (led by William Massey), and one with a paper-thin majority. (Massey’s first government formed mid-term when ‘Independent Liberal’ Gordon Coates was coaxed by Massey to join the conservative Reform Party. Massey’s first action was to abolish the two-ballot system – effectively preferential voting as in Australia – and return to the First Past the Post system whereby many elected representatives receive well under half of all votes cast.)

Under its present configuration of parties, it’s hard to see how Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance Party cannot control France’s parliament. So, it will be the back-room coalitions which determine the extremity or otherwise of future French parliaments.

United Kingdom

The next election in the United Kingdom looks like being fought between a divided – and somewhat conservative Labour Party – and a Conservative Party which has outstayed its welcome. I am guessing that the centrist Liberal Democrats will score well, though the outcome will be determined by the balance of unpopularity between Labour and Conservative. If the balance of unpopularity is a fine one, and the Liberal Democrats go for a programme like that in New Zealand of TOP, then the United Kingdom may eventually achieve an outcome in line with popular appeal. But there are many ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’.

The United Kingdom has had a deeply frustrating time with its democracy, of late. The point to note here is that those people voting for large small parties – like UKIP in United Kingdom, and the former Social Credit in New Zealand – and people in ‘safe’ constituencies, are rendered invisible to the elite political classes. One result is that David Cameron made a huge political mistake in 2015, promising a referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union. The unexpected outcome was the result of a rare opportunity by those rendered invisible by the First Past the Post system, to render themselves visible.

Germany

Germany uses the MMP proportional system, the prototype of the New Zealand system. Before World War Two it had a different proportional system, with lower thresholds. As is well known, Germany gained a very extreme government in 1932, as the Great Depression peaked; a great depression made especially severe by both the post World War One Treaty of Versailles and the needless fiscal conservatism (ie austerity) of the centre-left coalition government prior to 1932. The Nazi Party came into the Bundestag (Parliament) on an anti-austerity economic programme, revealing its true colours (of national expansionism and ethnic scapegoating) later, once entrenched in power. The path to the Nazi outcome was a leftish government pursuing deflation, extreme fiscal conservatism; a mix of austerity and unimagination.

Elections were held in Germany in May 1928 (2.6% to the Nazis), Sep 1930 (18.3% to the Nazis), July 1932 (37.3% to the Nazis), Nov 1932 (33.1% to the Nazis), March 1933 (43.9% to the Nazis), and Nov 1933 (92.1%! to the Nazis). Before the Great Depression the Nazi party was a ‘lunatic fringe’ party. Adolf Hitler rode to power on the path of political instability and fiscal austerity.

In Germany today, while the parties in the present Bundestag cover a wide spectrum of ideologies, the post-war culture is to form coalitions around the centre, especially in a very close election. The problem is that the centre in Germany – defined by the Social Democrats (like NZ Labour) and the Christian Democrats (like NZ National) – is a centre of bland fiscal conservatism and of export-focussed mercantilism. We should not look to Germany to find solutions to the world’s financial problems.

New Zealand again

In New Zealand, consider these three-election sequences. The statistic quoted will be the percentage of votes for the parties to the left of (and opposed to) the leading conservative party.

In each case, in the middle year, National (or its equivalent, Reform) swept to power, following centre-left governments which had ‘lost their mojo’.

In the first three cases (all first-past-the-post elections) the centre-left subsequently swept back in the popular vote. (Though, thanks to the prevailing voting system, in 1978 and 1993 there was no change of government. Even in 1935, Labour’s route to power may have depended on a split in the right-wing vote; the extreme-right Democrats got 7.8% of the vote, and split the vote in many electorates.) The centre-right governments of 1931, 1975 and 1990, which lost favour massively in the subsequent election, moved away from policies of austerity; real austerity (in 1993) or perceived austerity (in 1978).

In 2011, something different happened. The centre-left failed to get its vote back. Labour was looking very divided and uncool, whereas the National-led government managed its optics well, taking credit for a re-emergence from the Global Financial Crisis. Part of that political management was the creation of the impression that the 2008 to 2011 government was more centrist than right-wing.

What will happen in 2026? Just now I heard Sue Bradford – former Green left-wing MP – comparing this new government with the National government elected in 1990. I think she’s correct. My sense is that the present government is as intent on making itself unpopular as that early 1990s’ government was. (Indeed both Finance Ministers were young; Ruth Richardson was 40, and Nicola Willis is 42.)

The difference is that Labour (with the other centre-left parties in Labour’s job lot) also gives the appearance that it is similarly intent on retaining their 2023 levels of unpopularity; as they were in 2011 after 2008, and also as the British Labour Party did after Margaret Thatcher gained power in the United Kingdom in 1979.

The 1935 to 1938 Labour government also gained a degree of unpopularity, with left and right factions seeking to find ways to renege on its radical centrist promises of universal social security and superannuation. In the end it was Michael Joseph Savage’s political skills in 1938 that enabled Labour to storm to victory in 1938, and to stay in power for 14 years. New Zealand voters are looking forward to a non-austere non-elitist non-ideological government in 2026; a government with pragmatic imagination (no, that’s not an oxymoron). Good luck to Jo and Joe Median.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

There may be some surprises when the final election count comes out today.

One particular point to note refers back to the United States presidential election of 2020, when the late votes in most states – those votes not counted on election night – very heavily favoured Biden over Trump. The context was that Trump had the election night ‘victory’.

It is possible that something similar could happen here. This election has some characteristics which means the ‘late votes’ – for want of a better name – could strongly reflect the frustrated voters who only decided to vote at all towards the end of the campaign; many being first-time voters or voters whose registration had elapsed on account of them being renters who have insecure housing, or young people living ‘at home’, or recent immigrants.

So, I am suggesting that there is a 10% chance that ‘The Left’ will have 60 or more seats this afternoon. And I think there is another 25% chance that ‘The Left’ will have more seats than ‘The Right’, where ‘Left’ means Labour/Green/TPM and ‘Right’ means National/Act. If this happens, National/Act will require NZ First to vote with them in Parliament, whereas, under the more likely scenario, National/Act will be able to get legislation through if NZ First abstains.

What I think is most likely to happen is that the Specials, mainly later votes rather than advance votes, will reflect the already known differences between election day voting and advance voting. This means that Labour, Green and New Zealand First should gain with the specials, with National being the biggest loser from these ‘late’ votes. We also should note that Green and Te Pati Māori traditionally improve with the specials, and are likely to do so again. This should mean that TPM is entitled to an extra party-list seat, eliminating the present overhang.

We should also note that preliminary vote tallies for Auckland (except the very outer electorates) are low. This reflects a significant diaspora of population from Auckland since around 2015; although we also note that Auckland has also received many immigrants in that time, and that Auckland’s population is probably on (or just past) the cusp of an accelerated replacement. (Such a replacement magnifies what is happening in New Zealand more generally, with the process amplified in Auckland.)

The low Auckland count on election night also probably means that the special votes will be weighted towards Auckland. There may be an effect from the specials this time that is similar to the late election-night wave in 2005, which swung the election to Labour when it first looked that National would prevail.

My best estimate is that this afternoon’s result will be:

• National 47 seats (up to 48 after Port Waikato)
• Labour 35 seats
• Green 15 seats
• Act 11 seats
• New Zealand First 8 seats
• Te Pati Māori 4 seats

Re the electorates, which the media overemphasise, I am picking that Labour will regain four seats which went to National on election night: Te Atatu, New Lynn, Nelson, Banks Peninsula. (So National should pick up one more list seat; though Green may get to 16 seats, meaning that National/Act may be four down from election night.) And I think that Carlos Cheung, looking safe in Mt Roskill on election night, will win that seat by less than 500.

My best guess is that Kelvin Davis and Pene Henare will hold on in their Māori seats. But, if not, these could flip, generating a TPM overhang, and thereby freeing up one or two list seats.

Re the process of counting, I think that the Electoral Commission could give running counts of late votes, and then do the final audit. This would make the counting process much faster. Perhaps more importantly, they could give much more precise information about where the special votes are from, and about the breakdown of their categories (eg overseas, absent from the electorate, first time registrations, and re-registrations). Each of these sub-categories, considered regionally, could make it much easier for statisticians to make reliable projections of the final count. (We note that well-conducted polls certainly mean we get quite reliable projections of our election outcome before election day. Major problems with pre-election polling mainly happen in jurisdictions with First-Past-the-Post voting, and their vagaries of marginal electorates and swing states.)

The mainstream media, and many officials and pundits, continue to overemphasise the role of ‘marginal electorates’; a role which is close to zero in determining the balance of party representation. An example of this is the presentation in Wikipedia of the electorate votes (by party) ahead of the actual party votes.

Another example of this is the obsession with electorate boundaries. I live in New Lynn which now has quite a strange ox-bow shape, giving parts of Titirangi to Kelston while including much of Avondale. The reality is that electorate size makes not a jot of difference to the final result. I think it would be far better to maintain stable electorate boundaries, drawn with reference to existing local authority boundaries. And it would be better for cities to have more populous electorates than rural areas. This ensures better rural representation through smaller rural electorates, while also noting that most of the list MPs have offices in the cities. Certainly, Auckland has had too many electorates in recent years, while many of the places with the highest vote counts have been hinterland electorates. (And I note that Dunedin could be a single urban seat, with Taieri a hinterland seat.)

Finally, I would like to congratulate the Electoral Commission for its information pamphlet for voters. They make it clear that the electorate votes are for people, not for parties. (Like mayoral votes, if you will.) I only wish that the commentariat would take note.

Wishing the new government the best, and noting that it needs to govern according to the actual concerns of the people, focussing on issues such as infrastructure, education, health, housing, inequality, sustainability and world peace. New Zealand’s most popular governments preserved and extended our traditions of universality; a tradition which promotes cohesion rather than division. Non-elite New Zealanders don’t like the targeting of morsels of welfare, and all the moral hazard problems that come with that approach.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.