Ashley Church.
If you’re confused about what happened on election night, you’re probably not alone. After weeks of being told that this was going to be one of the closest elections in New Zealand’s history, we’ve ended up with a result that appears to leave the country in political limbo. Nobody has claimed victory, the special votes haven’t been counted, and there’s still talk of the possibility of a Labour-led government.
But there’s a lot more clarity in the result than some of the commentary would suggest and while nothing is certain, let me give you a bit of early reassurance: while the emergence of a Labour-led coalition is not impossible – it would require a series of the most unlikely ‘lucky breaks’ in modern political history to all fall its way. Instead, the numbers point strongly toward the return of a National-led coalition.
Let me explain why.
On election night, National won 42 seats, ACT won 13 and New Zealand First won 12. That’s 67 seats for the existing coalition.
On the other side, Labour won 36, the Greens 16, Te Pāti Māori five and the Opportunity Party seven. That’s 64 seats between them – including TOP which, we were told, was going to be the Kingmaker, sitting in the middle deciding who would be Government.
So the centre right has a majority over all of the parties of the left – including TOP. However Parliament is also bigger. There are normally 120 MPs – but this term there could be as many as 131 MPs because of the overhang. In simple terms, National and Te Pāti Māori won more electorate seats than their party votes would normally entitle them to, and they’re allowed to keep those seats – so National has seven ‘overhang’ seats and Te Pāti Māori has four.
That means a government needs 66 seats to command a majority, and the existing coalition currently has 67.
So far, so good – but there are still approximately 399,000 special votes to count, and some close electorate results could change. For example, National leads by just 139 votes in Wairarapa and 456 in Hamilton East.
But those 399,000 special votes aren’t quite the bogey they’re being made out to be. To understand why – here are four simple things to understand about the way MMP works.
First, National’s 42 seats are all electorate seats. It has no list MPs to lose. Even if its party vote dropped to 24%, it would still have 42 MPs, provided it held those electorates. Its overhang would simply get bigger.
Second, if National does lose an electorate, the overhang shrinks and Parliament becomes smaller. On the current party-vote allocations, even losing both Wairarapa and Hamilton East would leave the coalition with 65 seats in a 129-seat Parliament, still a majority.
Third, Labour winning an electorate from National doesn’t automatically increase Labour’s numbers. It simply swaps one of its existing list MPs for an electorate MP. Labour’s total stays the same.
And finally, recent changes to the law mean that, this year, voters had to be enrolled almost two weeks before election day, rather than being able to enrol at the voting booth. In my experience of elections, late enrolment has been an important part of left-wing voter mobilisation, including organised efforts to get supporters to polling places – so removing election-day enrolment changes the composition of the special-vote pool, which gives us good reason to question whether the old voting patterns will repeat themselves.
Of course, the special votes could change other parties’ list-seat allocations, particularly ACT’s or New Zealand First’s, and that could change the arithmetic. But this has never happened in any previous MMP election and even a fall in National’s party vote, or a couple of close electorate losses, doesn’t automatically change who can form a government.
Which brings us to the four possible outcomes.
The first, and the most straightforward likely outcome, is that National, ACT and New Zealand First will simply carry on governing. The balance between them has changed, with National weaker and its partners stronger, so the coalition agreements would almost certainly need renegotiating. But the existing parties would have the numbers to govern without anybody else.
The second possibility is that the coalition loses its outright majority and reaches a confidence-and-supply agreement with Opportunity. In plain English, that means Opportunity agrees to support the government on the votes necessary to keep it in office and pass its budgets, in return for concessions on some of its policies. Opportunity has published five formal bottom lines, covering competition, health, the environment, political donations and climate policy.
The third possibility is that Opportunity joins the government as a fourth coalition partner. That would give it a more formal role, potentially including ministerial positions, although the policy differences between the parties would make negotiations complicated. It’s worth noting that, on current numbers, this would give the Governing bloc of National-NZ First-ACT-Opportunity 73 seats vs an opposition with 57 – so you can see why TOP has a strong rationale for going with the right.
And, yes, the fourth possibility is that Labour somehow assembles a government with the Greens, Te Pāti Māori and Opportunity. This is mathematically possible if several things change in the final count, but it’s a very very remote prospect. It would require a particularly unfavourable combination of electorate and list-seat changes for the existing government, followed by a successful four-party negotiation.
In other words, while Opportunity has been portrayed for months as the party that would decide whether the left or right governs, that may not be the position at all. On the current numbers it isn’t needed by National, and even if National loses its majority, Opportunity may be negotiating with a bloc that remains stronger than the combined opposition.
So the most sensible working assumption is that the current coalition will return – but it also raises a much bigger question.
Is this an endorsement of National?
Absolutely not.
In fact, I think National would be making a catastrophic mistake if it interpreted this result as permission to carry on doing what it’s been doing for the past three years.
Look at what actually happened. National’s party vote has fallen from 38.1% in 2023 to just 29.2%. That’s a staggering loss of support in just 3 years and National has brought much of this upon itself.
For three years its leadership has displayed an extraordinary arrogance toward the very people who elected it. Supporters have repeatedly expressed their frustration with the direction of the government, only to be met with the same apparent conviction that the leadership knows best. It’s the sort of arrogance we normally associate with a tired second or third-term government, yet National seemed to acquire it almost from the moment its ministers’ bottoms touched their seats in 2023. The party has consistently failed to understand what its supporters were telling it, and its refusal to seriously reconsider its policy direction has steadily eroded the goodwill that brought it to office. Saturday’s result should be seen against that background.
Yet even now, senior figures within National, including Luxon, are dismissing the role that strategic voting played in actually keeping them in office.
I find that position extraordinary because the numbers tell a very clear story: On provisional results, National has won 7 more seats than it would be entitled to from the List and ACT and NZ First have both increased their party vote (Act – 8.6% in 2023 to 10.9% in 2026, New Zealand First 6.1% to 9.8%). These results can be directly attributed to the overhang strategy that National is now playing down and dismissing these numbers as coincidence or simply the product of strong local candidates ignores the reality on the ground.
It’s also worth remembering that National’s leadership, unbelievably, went out of its way to discourage the strategy, even as voters were being offered a perfectly legitimate way to strengthen the governing bloc under MMP. That response should remind us all about how disconnected National has become from the people it relies upon for support.
This simply reinforces the defining characteristic of National’s first term: its overwhelming arrogance. Its leadership has behaved as though winning office in 2023 entitled it to govern according to its own preferences and to ignore the policies it had promoted to the electorate. The repeated warnings from supporters, the refusal to change trajectory, the inability of Christopher Luxon to establish a genuine connection with the electorate, and most recently the extraordinarily arrogant advice to National voters not to participate in the overhang strategy all point to the same problem. The leadership has consistently believed it knows better than its own voters.
And that brings me to what needs to happen now.
National should treat the next three years as though it has just been elected for the first time. It should return to the commitments it made in 2023, recognise how far it has drifted from the expectations of its supporters, and rebuild itself around a much clearer programme of reform.
That requires considerably more than a reshuffle, a few policy adjustments or another collection of carefully worded announcements.
It requires a clean sweep. A completely fresh approach, a new leader, new faces and a genuine determination to become the government that its supporters believed they were electing in 2023.
Christopher Luxon has had three years to establish the direction, character and public identity of his government and he has failed. The result of his leadership is a National Party polling below 30% – so the party needs change at the top. Someone who understands its supporters, connects naturally with the public and can explain a compelling vision of where New Zealand should go.
There’s an interesting comparison in Britain. The Conservative Party was decimated in 2024 after years in which its supporters became increasingly disillusioned with its direction. Under Kemi Badenoch, the party has begun to recover some of that lost support, with recent polling showing a stronger Conservative position than we’ve seen for some time. It’s still a long way from completing that recovery, but Badenoch has demonstrated the value of a leader prepared to challenge her party’s past mistakes, listen to disaffected supporters and give people a reason to reconsider their allegiance. National could learn something from that experience.
And that change needs to happen right now, in the next few days, before the next coalition agreements are negotiated and signed.
The election is over. Changing National’s leader won’t change a single vote that’s already been cast. But it could profoundly change the direction of the government that emerges from those votes.
And timing matters. If National is serious about starting again, ACT, New Zealand First and potentially Opportunity need to know who they’re negotiating with and what that person intends to deliver over the next three years. There’s little point in locking a new leader into coalition agreements negotiated by the old one, particularly if the purpose of changing leadership is to establish a substantially different direction. Waiting until the new government is established would also make a fundamental change of direction considerably harder, because the new leader would inherit commitments already negotiated and a policy framework already agreed.
A refreshed National Party then needs to get serious about economic growth, reducing unnecessary government spending, restraining the size of the public service, removing barriers to investment and enterprise, and creating a tax and regulatory environment that rewards people who build businesses, employ staff and take risks.
It means identifying the parts of the economy that are already performing and removing the obstacles to their growth, rather than assuming that another government programme will provide the answer.
It also means reconnecting with the social and cultural values of traditional National supporters. The coalition will inevitably have differences on some of those issues, and that’s the reality of MMP – but National should stop behaving as though its principal responsibility is to preserve as much as possible of the policy direction established under the Ardern-Hipkins government.
This election wasn’t as close as it was because New Zealand suddenly developed an overwhelming appetite for a return to a Labour government. It was close because National made it close.
The electorate has delivered a result that gives the centre-right a second chance to continue governing – but the huge reduction in National’s party vote should be treated as a warning of just how much goodwill the party has already burned.
The opportunity now is to use the next three years to create the government that voters thought they were electing in 2023.
