New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark called elections for Nov. 8, tying her claim to a historic fourth term in New Zealand to strong environmental credentials amid a faltering economy and rising support for the conservative opposition.
Already among the longest-serving elected women leaders in the world, Clark is hoping she can extend her nine years in office for another three years and equal the record for New Zealand’s longest-serving leader in a century.
“I do believe the future of New Zealand is at stake,” Clark told a news conference yesterday at which she announced the election date. “I believe that Labour has shown through its record in office that we can be trusted with the future of New Zealand.”
Clark, 58, faces an uphill battle, with recent opinion polls showing that the conservative National Party has its best chance in a decade of winning the elections in the South Pacific nation of about 4.3 million people.
John Key, the 47-year-old head of the National Party, is a multimillionaire former investment banker and currency trader with a fresh team that includes only a few former ministers from its time in government in the 1990s.
Trailing the National Party by 10 points in recent polls, Clark’s center-left government is suffering from voter fatigue after nine years in power, amid a widespread feeling that change is needed.
Despite presiding over the longest period of growth in a generation, Labour is going into the election with the economy in recession and facing “a difficult” next two years, the nation’s central bank said.
Clark’s government is being blamed in part for the economic downturn, and has been hit by scandals including campaign finance investigations into Foreign Minister Winston Peters, who leads a party that supports the ruling coalition.
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
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