Over the 33 years between 1990 and 2023, and allowing for the aberrant 2020 result, the average level of support enjoyed by the parties of the Left and the Right turns out to be, as near as dammit, identical

By Chris Trotter*

Worldwide, the parties of the Left are presented as experiencing significant electoral decline. Certainly, in the 70 elections that took place across the planet in 2024 there wasn’t all that much for left-wingers to celebrate. But, does a review of New Zealand’s recent political history reveal a similarly receding electoral tide? How much evidence is there that, over the past 30 years, this country has become a part of what some commentators are calling “The Global Drift to the Right”?

The latest analysis detailing a worldwide decline in voter support for the Left was published in the right-wing British newspaper The Telegraph on 16 January 2025. Looking back over the past 30 years, journalists Meike Eijsberg and James Crisp felt confident enough to proclaim that “The Left is more unpopular than any time since the Cold War”.

Even so, the Left’s global average, based on the results of the most recent electoral contests in 73 countries, isn’t exactly dire. Indeed, at 45.4 percent, the level of public support would strike most leftists as comfortable. Sure, the Right, especially in North America and Europe, is currently riding high, but at 51 percent globally, the forces of conservatism are only a few percentage points away from defeat.

What’s more, in Africa and Latin America the forces of the Left remain in the ascendancy. Not to the same extent as a decade, or two, ago, but still – the success of Argentina’s Javier Milei notwithstanding – well ahead of the Right.

The Telegraph being The Telegraph, New Zealand’s ideological divisions have, for the most part been lumped-in with those of our Australian neighbours. The downfall of Jacinda Ardern is, however, noted with, one assumes, a fair measure of schadenfreude. Ardern was not liked by The Telegraph, which never passed-up an opportunity to devalue and downplay the extraordinary achievements of New Zealand’s young prime minister during the Covid-19 global pandemic’s first, terrifying, months.

Eijsberg’s and Crisp’s anticipation of a conservative victory in Australia similarly betrays their newspaper’s unabashed partisanship. Anthony Albanese may be no one’s idea of a charismatic political leader, but, to a great many Australians the alternative, Liberal Party Leader Peter Dutton, comes across as a hard-core – bordering on fanatical – right-winger. As things now stand across the Tasman, the safest bet would appear to be on a 2025 election with no clear winner – and lots of losers.

What, then, does the electoral record tell us about the fortunes of the New Zealand Right and Left over the past thirty years? Does the Left register a steadily descending trend-line? Are the parties of the Right entrenching themselves ever-more-firmly in the role of New Zealand’s “natural” leaders? Or are we presented with a altogether more nuanced history?

Between the election of 1990 and that of 1999, the most arresting feature of the Left-Right divide is the acute vulnerability of the Right’s overall position. National’s success in both 1990 and 1993 was entirely attributable to the unfairness of the First-Past-the-Post (FPP) electoral system.

Jim Bolger’s defeat of the Fourth Labour Government was presented – at the time, and still is today – as a landslide win. In terms of the popular vote, however, it was an extraordinarily close contest. Yes, National received 47.82 percent of the votes cast, but, between them, Labour, the Greens and Jim Anderton’s NewLabour Party attracted the support of 47.15 percent of the voting public.

The narrowness of National’s win never seemed to be fully appreciated by Bolger and his hardline Cabinet. The electorate’s embittered judgement on Bill Birch’s Employment Contracts Act, Ruth Richardson’s “Mother of All Budgets” and Jenny Shipley’s harsh “welfare” policies, was, however, rendered three years later, when National’s share of the popular vote plummeted from 47.82 percent to 35.05 percent. The Left’s share of the vote (Labour + Alliance) was 52.89 percent. That figure rises even higher, to 61.29 percent, when NZ First’s 8.40 percent is tacked on!

That National, with barely a third of the votes cast, was, nevertheless, able to form a government, vindicated in dramatic fashion the arguments of those who had promoted, successfully, a change to a proportional electoral system.

The power conferred upon Winston Peters and his moderate populists in NZ First, and, to a lesser degree, upon Peter Dunne’s succession of shape-shifting electoral vehicles, renders an accurate assessment of the Left-Right balance problematic.

In the 1996 election, the first held under the rules of Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) representation, for example, the anti-government parties collectively accounted for 51.64 percent of the Party Vote. The mutual mistrust of Peters and Anderton, however, resulted in a National-NZ First coalition government. The messy dissolution of the coalition, just 18 months later, made clear the unwisdom of “protest” parties pledged to unseating the government, perversely restoring its leading players to power.

Over the course of the 18 years separating the general elections of 1999 and 2017, electoral success and ideological dominance (albeit in a muted sense) was shared evenly between the parties of the Left and the Right.

In the nine years that the Left Bloc was dominated by Helen Clark’s Labour Party, supported by Jim Anderton’s Alliance and The Greens, its collective share of the Party Vote averaged almost exactly 50 percent. The Right Bloc, by contrast, averaged just 39 percent between 1999 and 2005.

The Right Bloc’s nine years of dominance – from 2008 until 2017 – were the mirror-image of the Left’s. Its component parties – National, Act and the Māori Party – also racked-up an average of 50 percent of the Party Vote – while the Left Bloc’s average election tally similarly dropped to 39 percent.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems altogether more appropriate to attribute this mirror-imaging to the quality of the contending block’s respective leaderships, than to grand ideological lurches. In Helen Clark and John Key, Labour and National were blessed with strong leaders who attuned themselves with remarkable accuracy to the mood of the electorate.

Throughout these 18 years, voter feeling was driven much more by exogenous events than ideological allegiances. The impact of 9/11 and the War on Terror; the Global Financial Crisis; the Christchurch Earthquake; these, and the way the government of the day responded to them, were what moved the electoral dial.

If 2024 feels more fraught and ideologically polarised than usual, that is, almost certainly, on account of the disruptive boost the Internet and social media have given to the generation and articulation of popular grievances; the impact of globalisation on core economic and social institutions, and the enormous global disjuncture occasioned by Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Overlay all that with the continuing slow burn of global warming, and is it really any wonder that everybody is looking to blame “the other lot”?

And yet, allowing for the obvious exception of the 2020 “Covid” election, which saw the Left Bloc’s share of the Party Vote soar to an unprecedented 57.87 percent, with Labour winning 50.01 percent of that on its own, the ideological balance of the last 30 years presents us with a curiously reassuring picture.

Over the 33 years between 1990 and 2023 (and allowing for the aberrant 2020 result) the average level of support enjoyed by the Left and Right blocs, at roughly 44.5 percent each, turns out to be, as near as dammit, identical.

Some might interpret this “tie” as evidence of a society split right down the middle and at daggers drawn. But, for most New Zealanders, it doesn’t feel that way at all. For most of us, it simply suggests that, although we may have to wait a little while for democracy to deliver the right (or left!) result, our side’s turn will come.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.