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Home / New Zealand

Barry Soper: In politics anything is possible

Barry Soper
By Barry Soper
Newstalk ZB's senior political correspondent·NZ Herald·
18 Jun, 2017 05:00 PM2 mins to read

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Is it possible that Gareth Morgan may be leading a majority government one day? Photo / Andrew Warner

Is it possible that Gareth Morgan may be leading a majority government one day? Photo / Andrew Warner

Barry Soper
Opinion by Barry Soper
Barry Soper is Newstalk ZB's senior political correspondent
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Think about it, Prime Minister Gareth Morgan, leading a majority government with half of his MPs never having been elected to office before.

There's a former rodeo rider, a refugee, an Pavlova entrepreneur and even a horror film producer. Half of his Government are women.

Forget Brexit or the subsequent
vote that saw British Prime Minister Theresa May, hoping for a more comfortable majority but hanging on by the skin of her teeth. Forget the triumphant tweeter Donald Trump moving up the road from his hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue and into the White House against all odds.

Think about the run for the money given to May by the unlikely, cycle riding pensioner Jeremy Corbyn who massaged the youth vote, just like Bernie Sanders did in the United States, battling for the Democratic nomination against Hilary Clinton.

The craggy, belligerent Prime Minister Morgan will put them all to shame.

Sounds absurd? Yes well it's highly unlikely to happen but these days in politics anything is possible as we're seeing in France at the moment which has to be the political story to beat them all.

The 47 million French voters are again today going to the polls and are expected to give their new 39-year-old President Emmanuel Macron a healthy majority. It's spectacular because Macron's party was only founded by him in April last year.

After he won the Presidency last month he was on his own, he didn't have one MP in the French Assembly. Since then he's had to cobble together 577 candidates to stand for his party and after the first round of voting they led in 400 constituencies, more than half of them women.

A second round of voting is now underway and likely to make it into the Assembly is a retired bullfighter, a Rwandan refugee, an eclair entrepreneur and yes, a horror film producer. A dead cert is a flamboyant mathematician who has a penchant for large spider brooches Cedric Vallani who'd make Albert Einstein look dowdy.

Let Macron's success be a warning to those established political parties who think elections are a walk in the park. The Socialists who ran the last French Government failed to scrape together even ten percent of the vote.

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