THE shock announcement by New Zealand’s prime minister, John Key, that he will step down on December 12th has caught the country on the hop. First elected in 2008, he remained popular and was widely expected to win a rare fourth term in office in a general election next year.
The 55-year-old Mr Key, who said he was standing down for the sake of his family, announced that he will back Bill English, the deputy prime minister and finance minister, when the MPs from his centre-right National Party pick a new leader next week. Mr English has yet to declare but is a likely contender. The opinion polls all say that Mr Key and his government are popular, with a wide lead over the opposition Labour Party.
It is not hard to see why. On a long list of yardsticks his country of only 4.7m people—“the last bus stop on the planet”, as Mr Key puts it, has been a striking success. The World Bank recently rated it the easiest place on earth to do business. The Legatum Insitute, a think-tank in London, judged it—by crunching nine different criteria—the world’s most prosperous spot. Transparency International, a Berlin-based anti-corruption monitor, reckons it to be the...Continue reading
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