Interesting how’s there’s no party running to the left of the greens, Marxism isn’t fanciful in NZ?
Bit of an effortpost here, and please correct me if I'm wrong cause I am not at all an expert here.
The Left in NZ, as is the case in the UK and elsewhere, had most of its strength traditionally in trade unions and social movements. By the end of the 80s, a lot of these forces had really been decimated. Especially with regards to the labor movement, the Employee Contracts Act of 1990 really put the hammer down on unions for a while. The CTU, ironically headed by a member of the Socialist Unity Party, was also more small-c conservative and preoccupied in salvaging what it had as opposed to doing a lot of new organizing. In the meantime, the fact that it was the Labour Party who carried out much of the shift to Neoliberalism gave a lot of space to the NewLabour Party and later the Alliance. This, plus the advent of MMP in 1993, meant that there was a lot of space and hope for the Left in electoral politics that just didn't exist elsewhere at the time. After Helen Clark won and repealed the worst parts of the ECA, the labor movement had some life again, and participation in government led to the usual splits and disagreements. Case in point, the Unite union that organizes fast food and hotel workers in NZ was started by a side in the Alliance split. So, there's a lot more openings in the labor movement and elsewhere these days, which takes energy away from a big Left electoral effort.
There will be lefties in the parliament this time, new Greens MPs Kerekere, Tuiono, and Menendez for instance. Menendez is a good example of the shift back to social movements: he's the former head of Auckland Action Against Poverty.
