By Tom Petterson, Socialist Equality
Group
9 November
2026
The New Zealand election last Saturday
has produced a crisis for the ruling elite, with neither the
incumbent National Party nor the opposition Labour Party
able to declare victory.
Support for the two
capitalist parties that have dominated politics for most of
the past century collapsed. National received 29.21 percent,
a major drop from 38 percent in the last election, while
Labour got just 29.36 percent. Their combined result, less
than 59 percent, is the lowest it has ever been. More than 4
out of 10 votes went to one of the smaller
parties.
Whether either side is able to form a
coalition government will not be clear for weeks or even
months. An estimated 399,365 special votes cast overseas, or
by people voting outside their electorate, or who enrolled
after the electoral roll was published, about 14 percent of
the total, will not be counted until November 27. This could
eliminate the National-led bloc’s current two-seat
majority.
Media commentators are expressing
nervousness about the uncertainty and the likely instability
of the next government. The Post’s Josie Pagani wrote:
“Whether National or Labour now provide the PM, that PM
will be politically weak” and predicted that a government
would not be formed before Christmas.
Turnout,
estimated at 74.6 percent of enrolled voters, is the
second-lowest in New Zealand’s history. Factoring in 6.3
percent of eligible people who did not enrol, turnout falls
to just 69.9 percent. More than 1.2 million people, nearly
one-third of eligible adults, did not vote.
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This
points to mass hostility and alienation from the entire
political establishment. As is the case internationally, the
economic crisis, soaring living costs and the developing
world war are driving workers and young people to the left
and into struggles. The lead-up to the election saw
nationwide strikes by university and polytechnic workers,
retail workers, firefighters and public servants.
The
National Party has led a right-wing coalition government for
the past three years that imposed brutal austerity measures.
It slashed thousands of jobs from the public sector,
increased student fees, kicked thousands of unemployed youth
off welfare, and cut wages for teachers and healthcare
workers.
The Labour Party, however, had no fundamental
differences with any of this. It promised during the
election campaign to continue cutting spending, while
supporting National’s plan to double the military
budget.
This bipartisan agenda, decided behind the
backs of the working class, is the reason why the election
campaign was so empty. The urgent issues facing workers were
buried by the media and the established parties. There was
no discussion about New Zealand’s integration into the
unfolding world war targeting Russia, Iran and China. Nor
did any party offer any solutions to plummeting wages,
soaring unemployment and the vast increase in the cost of
living facing workers.
In the preliminary results, the
National Party and its far-right allies, ACT and NZ First,
have 67 out of 131 seats in parliament. Incumbent Prime
Minister Christopher Luxon declared on election night, “we
have a pathway to forming the next government,” but added
that “it is too close to call.”
The National Party
has 42 seats compared with Labour’s 36, despite getting
fewer party votes than Labour. This is because the Mixed
Member Proportional (MMP) voting system allows people to
vote for both an electorate MP and a party.
The
billionaire Mowbray family—New Zealand’s richest
family—ran a campaign encouraging right-wing voters to
“split your vote” by voting for National’s electorate
candidates and giving their party vote to ACT or NZ First.
National appears to have won seven more seats than what it
would be entitled to based on its party vote.
National
has lost senior MPs who were not standing in electorates,
including Finance Minister Nicola Willis, Attorney-General
Chris Bishop, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith and Speaker
Gerry Brownlee. Its far-right partners, meanwhile, have
grown stronger, giving them more sway in the coalition. The
ACT Party, which advocates for a drastic reduction in the
size of government and a three-year freeze on the minimum
wage, increased its vote share from 8.6 percent in 2023 to
10.9 percent. The racist, anti-immigrant NZ First Party got
9.78 percent, up from 6.08 percent in the last
election.
These results do not reflect a shift to the
right among workers. Combined support for National, ACT and
NZ First has fallen from 52.7 percent three years ago to
just 49.9 percent. Even if this does not drop further when
special votes are counted, it means that just 34.8 percent
of the eligible population voted to re-elect the
coalition.
A re-elected National-led government will
have no significant popular support and will come into
direct conflict with the working class. There is already
mass hostility to its austerity measures, soaring living
costs and its support for the criminal US-Israeli war
against Iran. The country is in a profound social crisis:
more than one in five children lives in poverty, one in 10
people rely on food banks, and 112,000 people are
“severely housing deprived.”
The Labour Party,
however, did not benefit from this. Despite the efforts of
the pseudo-left groups and the trade union bureaucracy to
portray Labour as a progressive alternative, its vote share
increased only slightly from its crushing defeat in 2023,
when it got 26.9 percent. If National and its allies are in
a position to return to power, it is because of the bitter
anger among workers towards Labour.
The 2017-2023
Labour-led government, which included the Greens and (until
2020) NZ First, was responsible for widening social
inequality, homelessness and child poverty. It starved
healthcare and education and, in 2022, scrapped the
initially successful COVID-19 elimination policy, leading to
thousands of deaths and severe illnesses.
For the past
three years Labour has worked with the union bureaucracy to
suppress opposition to the National-led government’s
attacks. The unions systematically isolated and betrayed
mass struggles, including the October 2025 strike by 100,000
teachers and healthcare workers, pushing through real wage
cuts and telling workers to place their hopes on the
election.
If Labour is able to stitch together a
coalition government, it will be a highly unstable alliance
of four parties, which will be tasked with imposing the same
ruthless agenda of war and austerity. Labour leader Chris
Hipkins used his election-night address to signal a further
shift to the right, declaring that the next parliament would
“require all of us to compromise, to work together and to
find a common ground.”
The Green Party got 13.3
percent in this election, its highest result ever, largely
at Labour’s expense. The Greens’ campaign postured
against the “super-rich” but promoted a very modest
wealth tax, which will be ditched if the Greens join a
Labour-led coalition government.
During the 2017-2023
government, the Greens supported Labour’s budgets which
starved public services and boosted military spending. In
2026 the Greens signalled their pro-imperialist credentials
by standing a former SAS member who fought in Afghanistan as
a candidate.
The Opportunity Party (TOP) gained 5.96
percent of the votes and will enter parliament for the first
time with 7 seats. TOP is a pro-business party, funded by
multimillionaire tech entrepreneurs and with an upper middle
class supporter base. Like the Greens, it promotes the fraud
that the problems of affordability, climate change and the
housing crisis can all be solved within capitalism. It has
said that it could join either a National- or Labour-led
coalition, and could soon be in a position to choose which
party will lead the next government.
Members of the
Māori nationalist Te Pāti Māori (TPM) won 5 of the 7
special Māori electorate seats (Labour candidates won the
other two). This is down from 6 seats that TPM gained in the
last election. One academic told Radio NZ that the margins
of victory for TPM’s leading members had “decreased
hugely.”
The party, which hopes to enter a
Labour-led coalition government, represents indigenous
business interests and was part of a National-led coalition
from 2008 to 2017. Last year it descended into chaos after
an internal power struggle between rival representatives of
the Māori bourgeoisie, resulting in the expulsion of two
MPs.
In opposition to all these parties, the Socialist
Equality Group intervened in the election and stood a
candidate, Tom Petterson, in the Hutt South electorate. This
was the first time the Trotskyist movement has stood in a
New Zealand election. In the preliminary results, Petterson
gained 42 votes, all of which would have been highly
conscious votes for a socialist alternative.
Moreover,
the SEG’s campaign was not aimed primarily at getting
votes. It warned the working class that nothing would be
resolved by the election or through parliament.
The
SEG is fighting to give the emerging anti-capitalist and
anti-war sentiment among workers a conscious, socialist and
internationalist perspective. SEG members and supporters
spoke with hundreds of workers, distributed thousands of
copies of the group’s election statement, and held an
important public meeting, raising the fundamental class
issues buried by the entire political
establishment.
It explained that whatever unstable
coalition government is formed in the coming weeks and
months, the working class will face immense struggles
against imperialist war and the assault on social programs
and living standards. Workers will come into conflict with
the entire political establishment and the trade union
apparatus, which serves to facilitate wage cuts, mass
redundancies and other attacks demanded by big business and
the state.
The critical task is to build the necessary
socialist and internationalist leadership to unite workers
in New Zealand with those in Australia, the Pacific and
internationally to put an end to the capitalist system and
establish a socialist society. We call on workers and young
people to join the SEG and fight to build the New Zealand
section of the Trotskyist movement, the International
Committee of the Fourth
International.
