Does Jacindamania in New Zealand and Corbynmania in the UK speak of the global rise of the Left?
There’s a General Election in New Zealand next week where Jacinda Arden, Labour leader of six weeks, has overturned the poll lead of the incumbent conservative prime minister, Bill English. Jacindamania looks eerily similar to Corbynmania: when Theresa May’s once commanding poll lead almost completely crumbled in the weeks before this June’s UK General Election.
Is it all happening again? Does Jacindamania and Corbynmania suggest a global swing to the Left? Or is Jacindamania part of a pattern of voter volatility?
Is Jacindamania the same thing as Corbynmania?
No. Jacinda Arden and Jeremy Corbyn are very different candidates.
Jeremy Corbyn entered the 2015 British Labour leadership contest as an unknown. His non-careerism – he has regularly got too close to terrorists – is interpreted as authenticity. His policy platform is 1970s big-state socialism: nationalisation of industry and high taxes on the rich, with a splash of 1968 student revolt panache.
Arden by contrast is a centrist career politician and a known quantity. She worked for prominent Labour MPs straight from university, as a civil servant in the Tony Blair administration, and held leadership roles in youth politics. By the time she made Deputy Leader of the Party she was immediately seen as a Prime Ministerial contender.
While, Jacinda ticks all the boxes of progressive left central casting (she is pro-abortion, pro-civil partnerships, pro-climate change policies, pro-legalisation of ‘medicinal marijuana’), she has inherited a centrist election platform on education, housing, transport and health. Moreover, her progressive credentials are thoughtfully presented as maximizing freedoms of the individual and not as the overthrow of an oppressive socially-conservative society.
So is this a rise of the global left?
But do these two different expressions of left wing politics, Corbyn and Arden, amount to a rise of the left? I don’t think so.
Popularity for the European left is for very different reasons to any popularity for Arden in New Zealand.
Europe has seen the left reject their established parties for new protest or populist parties.
Podemos in Spain has displaced the traditional socialist party, PSOE. While Italy’s Five Star Movement in its very name is a rejection of traditional party machinery.
In the UK, Momentum wants to return Labour to its socialist and grass roots. It describes itself as a ‘movement’ with half a million members, according to leading light Owen Jones in this video.
This tone of radical left agitation across Europe has formed in a context of intense European Union involvement in national policy: particularly among the southern European Eurozone countries.
Syrzia’s government of Greece has been a long sit-in protest against EU austerity measures.
And in Italy, Mario Monti was installed by the EU as Prime Minister in 2011-2013, without a popular vote, in order to bring in emergency austerity measures.
In other words, left wing politics within the EU have flourished in a context of degraded national sovereignty. Mythologies of ‘class struggle’ are more resonant when austerity has been imposed by unelected overlords, punishing the masses for mistakes made by greedy capitalists. Parties can be more protest-minded when electoral politics have less bearing on national policy.
The three-term prime minister pendulum effect
This is not the context for Jacinda Arden where the surprise swing to the left may be down to something as simple as an electorate’s capricious appetite for novelty. Not willing to reward a government for doing a good job at balancing the books but, in a pattern all too familiar to the political right, to reject it instead.
The Nationals won three elections thanks to a charismatic political giant. Up until December 2016 John Key was Prime Minister. Key, admired by David Cameron as his favourite conservative and by campaigners for being the ideal political client, was the streetwise, blue collar, son of a single mother who grew up in state housing, and made it big on Wall Street. Bill English, the finance minister and Deputy PM has inherited the post.
It is similar to when Tony Blair who won three elections gave way to his Chancellor Gordon Brown who lost an election.
And these charismatic election-winning successes leave a long wake. Jacinda Arden reminds Kiwis of ‘Aunty Helen’, New Zealand’s three term Labour Prime Minister of 1999 – 2008. The pendulum may simply be swinging back now that the Labour Party are on their fifth leader after nine years in exile.
So that Arden may just be in the right place at the right time – ready to cash in on an electorate’s boredom with a finance minister who has been a fixture for a long time.
And Bill English’s campaign video doesn’t help: dull, fixated on his work ethic and family values. There is no peacetime vision for prosperity. Conservatives like to swoop in, fix a crisis; the emergency service of politics. But now Arden is happy to spend the fattened public purse.
Whatever the result of next week’s election (on 23 September), a win for Labour in New Zealand does not suggest the dawn of left-wing dominance across the West.
New Zealand’s election result will be a sure sign that somewhere – beyond the polarising politics of America and the fracturing centrifugal forces of the EU that resulted in Brexit and the rise of a populist Left – an archipelago of five million people floating in the Pacific are simply choosing between two tame candidates who both are centrists and political professionals. It’s a comforting throw back to the sort of politics that was once fashionable elsewhere in the West.
