WELLINGTON, New Zealand ? Prime Minister John Key enters New Zealand's elections Saturday with an overwhelming popularity undimmed by an eleventh-hour scandal and with a historic chance to win an outright majority for his center-right party.
If opinion polls hold, Key's National Party would be the first party to secure a majority on its own since the country abolished a winner-take-all voting system and replaced it in 1996 with a proportional one that generally results in a more fractured parliament.
Anything short of a majority, however, and Key will need to find political partners to form a stable government.
What's not in doubt is Key's personal popularity ? despite a scandal in recent days over a recorded conversation. After three years in power, polls show the former currency trader is far more popular than his main opponent, Labour party leader Phil Goff. Key has earned the nickname "Teflon John" for the way that nothing politically damaging seems to stick to him.
"He's a clever strategist and a good manager," said Jennifer Lees-Marshment, a political studies lecturer at the University of Auckland.
She said Key has been adept at knowing when to forge ahead with policies and when to pull back. His common touch was reassuring to people when a deadly earthquake struck Christchurch in February, she said, and enabled him to share in their excitement in October when the country's national All Blacks team won the Rugby World Cup.
Key's campaign has focused primarily on the economy. He's promising to bring the country back into surplus and begin paying down the national debt within three years. Part of his plan to achieve that is to sell minority stakes in four government-owned energy companies and in Air New Zealand.
That's where the center-left Labour party has found its biggest point of difference. Goff is promising not to sell anything and to raise money by other means, including by introducing a capital gains tax and by raising the age at which people get government pensions by two years to 67.
On the campaign trail, however, those issues got crowded out by something that became known as the teapot tape saga.
Key had invited media along to an Auckland cafe where he was meeting a political ally. After a photo opportunity, Key asked the media to leave in order to talk privately with the man.
However, one cameraman left a recording device running in a cloth pouch. Key complained to the police, saying it was an illegal recording of a private conversation. But the cameraman maintained that he'd taped the conversation inadvertently in the confusion of the media scrum, and besides, it wasn't a private setting anyway.
The tape has never been publicly aired, although opponents, who may have been leaked transcripts, claim the prime minister makes rude and embarrassing political comments. Three days before the election, police began serving search warrants on four media outlets, seeking the tape and related material.
Lees-Marshment said she thinks the saga had a curious effect. At first, she said, people thought Key might have something to hide. But then they tired of the attention given to the story, she said, and may have begun feeling more sympathetic toward Key.
"It became a story about the story," she said. "The voters got put off by it."
The saga certainly didn't seem to do much to boost the campaign of Goff, who was effectively shut out of any coverage for a few days. Labour's lackluster polling, about 28 percent, has pundits speculating Goff will be replaced as leader of the party within days of the election.
But the teapot saga did seem to boost the fortunes of Winston Peters, who leads the small New Zealand First party. Peters grabbed the headlines with pointed criticism of Key over the affair and his poll numbers shot up.
Another winner in the election is likely to be the Green party, which is polling about 12 percent, putting it on target for its best ever showing.
Voters in the election will also decide whether to keep their electoral system, in which parties get a proportion of parliamentary seats based on the proportion of the votes they receive. Some want to return to a winner-takes-all format, although polls indicate most favor sticking with their current system.
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