New Zealand’s PM overwhelmingly re-elected

WELLINGTON, Oct. 17 (YPA) – Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s center-left Labor Party in New Zealand has overwhelmingly won Saturday’s general elections in the country after voters rewarded her for its decisive response to COVID-19.

The party won 64 of the 120 seats in the Parliament.

This mandate means that Ardern, 40, can form the first single-party government in New Zealand in decades and face the challenge of implementing the gradual transformation she had promised but failed to achieve in her first term in which Labor shared power with a nationalist party.

“Let’s keep moving,” Ardern, the country’s 40th prime minister, told her enthusiastic fans at her residence in Auckland, in a live speech posted on her Facebook page.

YPA