Mr. Hipkins, a household name in New Zealand for his role overseeing the country’s response to the pandemic, was nominated to succeed Jacinda Ardern as leader of the governing Labour Party.
Chris Hipkins, who has been serving as New Zealand’s education and policing minister, is set to become the country’s new prime minister next month after he was the only member of the governing Labour Party to be nominated for the party leadership post.
Members of the Labour caucus will meet on Sunday in the New Zealand city of Napier, where they are currently at their summer retreat, to endorse the nomination and confirm Mr. Hipkins as their party’s new leader. At least 10 percent of the caucus must vote for Mr. Hipkins to confirm him.
His nomination comes after the surprise resignation on Thursday of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who had become a global liberal icon during her tenure.
“I believe that leading a country is the most privileged job anyone could ever have, but also one of the more challenging,” Ms. Ardern said at the news conference announcing her decision. “You cannot and should not do it unless you have a full tank.”
Ms. Ardern has said she will leave her post “no later” than Feb. 7, giving the party about two weeks to complete the transition.
A clear front-runner from the moment Ms. Ardern revealed her decision to step down, Mr. Hipkins promised a seamless leadership transition without the infighting and back-alley machinations common to many political parties.
“We will select a new leader that the party will then unite behind,” he said, after Ms. Ardern’s resignation. “Leadership contests don’t have to be like the Hunger Games.”
Mr. Hipkins, nicknamed Chippy, became a household name in New Zealand during his daily televised briefings throughout the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic.
As first as the health minister and then as the minister for the Covid-19 response, Mr. Hipkins, 44, became the face of — and often the driving force of the policies behind — the country’s stringent, but widely applauded approach to the virus.
The country’s policies resulted in few deaths but included some of the world’s most extensive restrictions in the first months of the pandemic — before the rules were all removed when the virus had been eradicated from the country, allowing New Zealanders to lead largely normal lives for most of the pandemic.
But as the Labour Party’s next leader, he will face a number of major challenges when the country goes to the polls on Oct. 14.
In a clash of two Chrises, Mr. Hipkins will go head-to-head against Christopher Luxon, the leader of the National Party and the former chief executive of New Zealand’s national airline, Air New Zealand.
Voters, facing the same pocketbook strains as people in many other parts of the world, are looking for solutions to biting inflation, an ongoing housing crisis and other entrenched social problems such as child poverty and crime. Polling suggests many believe the governing party has not provided the policy answers to those problems, with 38 percent favoring the center-right National Party compared with Labour’s 33 percent, as of last month.
Mr. Hipkins may also struggle to get beyond his association with pandemic policy, potentially a double-edged sword with voters eager to put the worst of the last three years behind them.
The country’s rigorous restrictions and vaccine mandates were initially popular with most New Zealanders. But as the rest of the world opened up and New Zealand’s borders remained shut, resentment began to grow, spurring a backlash and resulting in a crowd of protesters camping outside Parliament’s grounds in Wellington for more than three weeks.
Even as her party slumped in the polls, Ms. Ardern had retained a certain star power that her successor may struggle to match. Instead, Mr. Hipkins, who has been a lawmaker since 2008, may bring to the campaign a reputation as a champion debater and an experienced policymaker, as well as a face familiar to most in the country.
Certain idiosyncrasies and odd moments — including a well-known fondness for Diet Coke; a time when he posed with a birthday cake made entirely of sausage rolls; and, ahead of a news conference held in a nature reserve, the surprise appearance of his mother, who apologized for his lateness — have been memorialized in countless internet jokes, earning him the unofficial title of “minister for memes.”
In a news conference on Saturday, Mr. Hipkins, who has cultivated a political brand of being approachable and down to earth, said that he was “humbled and honored” to assume the party’s leadership and that he was “incredibly optimistic” about New Zealand’s future.
He added: “I’m a human being. I’ll make the odd mistake from time to time, I try and own the mistakes that I make. I don’t pretend to be someone that I’m not. I’ve never done that in the past. And I don’t intend to start doing it.”
A “boy from the Hutt,” as he described himself in the news conference, Mr. Hipkins grew up in the industrial and unglamorous Hutt Valley north of Wellington, the New Zealand capital.
He majored in politics and criminology at Victoria University of Wellington, where he was twice elected student body president. As a first-year student in 1997, he was arrested, strip-searched and detained overnight for protesting a higher education reform bill that he later said would “turn academic entities into corporate entities, treat students as customers.”
The government in 2009 apologized to and compensated the protesters.
In his first speech in Parliament as a newly elected member in 2008, Mr. Hipkins cited family, community spirit and state support as chief priorities, and called for reform to New Zealand’s welfare system, which he said should help those “at the bottom” to scale “the ladder of opportunity.”
“The needs of the competitive free market are balanced by the need for the government to set a few boundaries and ensure that the most vulnerable are protected,” he said.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
