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National leader John Key is New Zealand’s next prime minister after his party took 59 seats at today’s general election.
National’s strategy for the past seven years has been to present leaders with adjective surnames in a bid to win the support of the country’s most important swing demographic: newspaper headline-writers.
But where Bill English and Don Brash failed, John Key has succeeded. Asked by The Daily Grind how important his surname was to the result, Mr Key responded that it was “pivotal” and we replied “no, try again.”
However he feels about it, lame puns will be “key” to his administration.
The adjective strategy was devised after National lost office under adverb-based prime minister Jenny Shipley.
Mr Key becomes the first New Zealand prime minister with an adjective for a surname since Robert Stout left office in 1887. We don’t count Mike Moore (1990) because he spelt it wrong, and “more” is technically an adverb.
The four-week campaign was largely overshadowed by the final weeks of the presidential campaign in the United States. The final result in the New Zealand parliament is 59 seats for National, 43 for Labour and 20 for Barack Obama.
The National campaign was organised around the theme of “change”, inviting comparisons with the Obama campaign. Any such comparison is clearly spurious: against Mr Obama, Mr Key’s successful business career and six years in parliament make him far better qualified to be President of the United States.
Support for the Labour-allied Greens party was well below what pollsters had predicted, leading the party’s supporters to suffer depression, paranoia, impairment of motor skills, and increased awareness of patterns and colours.
You'll be hearing more from National in the next three years—but hopefully you'll hear much, much less of their cloying, manipulative kids choir ads.
