Hailed for its effective response to the first wave of the epidemic, New Zealand postponed the parliamentary elections by four weeks on Monday due to a return of the coronavirus pandemic.
The elections, which were to take place on September 19, have been postponed until October 17, announced Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who led the polls.
The country has achieved the feat of not recording any new cases for 102 days before experiencing, since early August, a resumption of contaminations. The main city of the country, Auckland, has also been reconfigured until August 26.
Auckland, New Zealand's largest city, reconfolds for three days
"This decision gives all parties time to campaign over the next nine weeks and gives the Election Commission enough time to ensure that an election can be held," said the Prime Minister.
This postponement was a request from his coalition partners and the conservative opposition, all parties having suspended their campaigns.
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The Labor leader acknowledged that the return of the epidemic had generated anguish and risked dissuading some voters from going to the polls, if the polls had taken place as planned on September 19. She also acknowledged the concerns of her rivals who felt that the suspension of the campaign mainly benefited her party.
Same winning strategy
She said the postponement meant that all parties would campaign on the same terms and warned that there would be no second postponement, regardless of the situation.
The first four cases in the same family were spotted earlier this week in New Zealand. It was 58 confirmed cases Monday, including five people who were hospitalized.
The archipelago opted for the same strategy as the one it had followed in the spring, by isolating the positive cases, massively testing the population and tracing the contacts of the infected people.
A darling of the international media, the leader, who has just turned 40, also enjoys in her country a record popularity rate of 60%, which is linked to her management of the pandemic, but also to her response to attacks against two Christchurch mosques last year or the recent White Island volcanic eruption.
His Labor Party is even in a position to win the elections on its own, without the help of the Green Party and the New Zealand Populists First (NZF) with whom he has been in a coalition for nearly three years.
