Two new coalitions

Two new governments have been installed as a result of recent elections, although one took rather more effort than the other.

The simpler one was in New Zealand, whose new prime minister, Christopher Luxon, was sworn in on Monday, a month and a half after his country’s election. As we reported at the time, his National Party somewhat underperformed expectations, so that even with the support of its preferred coalition partner, ACT, it commands only 60 seats in the 123-seat parliament.

To reach a majority it was necessary to do a deal with New Zealand First, and although it took a couple of weeks there was never much doubt that would succeed and that Luxon would pay the necessary price. All three parties will join the government, with NZ First’s Winston Peters to take the first turn as deputy prime minister, followed in mid-2025 by ACT’s David Seymour.

Peters and Seymour are sworn enemies and come from very different places philosophically: ACT is a free-market liberal party with a “libertarian” edge, while NZ First is a typical far-right party, hostile to the market and to foreigners. There is some policy overlap between them, however, and there is evidence that voters regard them as reasonably close substitutes.

This is still very much a National Party government; it has 14 of the 20 ministers in cabinet (with three each for ACT and NZ First), and Luxon will be able to play his junior partners off against each other. But given Peters’s long history as a loose cannon, it would not be surprising if there are some difficult times ahead for the new prime minister.

They pale, though, in comparison to the difficulties faced by Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, also sworn into office with a new government this month – not quite four months after the July election. After first coming to power in 2018 he has had a rough time of it, with two elections in 2019 and then this year’s early election, called after his opponents scored big victories in regional elections.

But the strategy of wrong-footing them worked, and Sánchez’s centre-left Socialists did better than expected, winning 121 of the 350 lower house seats. His coalition partner, the far-left Sumar (a reworked and more moderate version of Podemos), didn’t do so well, but could contribute another 31, leaving him 24 seats short of a majority.

The opposing forces of centre-right and far right had 171 seats, but little prospect of getting beyond that. After centre-right leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo failed to win a vote of confidence at the end of September, Sánchez was given the opportunity to try to win support from the mixture of Basque and Catalan regionalist parties that hold the balance of power. Earlier this month he reached a deal with them, including the promise of an amnesty for Catalonia’s independence activists.

Given the fraught history there was no guarantee the deal would hold up, and many thought that abstention from some of the separatists would be the best Sánchez could hope for. But two weeks ago all of them – 14 Catalans, 11 Basques, a Galician and a Canary Islander – duly turned out and voted confidence in the new government, which won the vote 179-171. The new ministers were sworn in last week.

Unlike Luxon, Sánchez doesn’t have all of the parties whose votes he needs actually participating in government; the regionalists have promised support, but from outside the tent. That makes some things easier, but he will be at their mercy in parliament. The unpopularity of the amnesty deal, however, while it will boost the confidence of the opposition will also make the Catalans most unlikely to risk forcing another early election.