After six years of Labour party rule in New Zealand, the country’s foreign policy brings to mind the line about everything being at sea except the fleet. While the conservative National party of prime-minister-elect Christopher Luxon won on familiar-sounding domestic problems – galloping consumer prices, spiking interest rates and urban crime – the importance of foreign policy was not that far away.
For decades, New Zealand has made much of its independent foreign policy stance
Luxon, a former airline boss, has hinted that he will be on board the diplomatic jet as soon as he has finished hammering out a coalition agreement. While the National party mustered an emphatic majority on election night, the country’s fiddly mixed-member proportional representation system requires him to first try to stitch together a governing deal with the other parties on the centre-right, the populist NZ First and the libertarian ACT party.
Israel is part of the story. But New Zealand faces questions from its traditional Anglosphere partners.
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