Two Winstons, One Show: How Peters is poised to dominate the 2026 campaign

Sunday, 23 November 2025

Andrea Vance is national affairs editor at The Post and Sunday Star-Times.

OPINION: Foreign diplomats in Wellington say, only half in jest, that they find themselves explaining to their capitals that New Zealand has two Winston Peters.

There is Foreign Minister Peters, the old hand, deftly navigating a world bristling with geopolitical hazards.

And then there is NZ First Leader Winston, the domestic fire-starter who emerges between trade missions to mock his prime minister’s economic acumen, chide his etiquette, and warn that the country is being transformed by careless immigration policies.

Next year - election year - those poor diplomats are going to have their work cut out. Because the second Winston is stirring.

Winston Peters has spent the past month prising daylight between himself and the three-headed coalition creature stitched together in late 2023. It has lumbered along only because no one dares let its heads fight to the death.

But now Peters is ready to take a bite out of the others.

He’s rubbished National’s talk of asset sales as “tawdry and silly”, scolded his partners for failing to get the economy moving, and sparked an unseemly “I versus we” spat with Christopher Luxon.

Luxon snapped back that Cabinet decisions are collective, meaning Peters owns the economic record he’s attacking.

Even so, the NZ First leader keeps slipping the traces: denouncing the Regulatory Standards Bill that his party voted through last week and promising to repeal it in 2026.

It’s the start of a familiar manoeuvre.

Peters steps back from the issues where the Government is most exposed, then pivots sharply into terrain where he can stake out his own ground, and where he has long wielded influence: immigration.

Back in the 1990s - while Trump was juggling bankruptcies and Nigel Farage was failing at the first of his repeated attempts to become an MP - Peters turned immigration into a racialised national anxiety.

He warned of a growing tide of East Asian migration and the country pricked its ears. Polls at the time showed nearly half of New Zealanders thought “there were too many Asians” here. Peters didn’t invent those sentiments, but he poured the concrete around them.

Time and time he has returned to the theme. Ahead of the 2017 election he was denouncing Labour and National’s “lax, loose policies” that had “allowed so many people to come here”, and claiming the economic impact was devastating.

Now he’s smoothing out the dog-eared pages of his old playbook. With MMP, he only needs a rump of disgruntled voters to turn that wedge into outsized influence.

At New Zealand First’s annual conference in September, Peters told delegates the party would campaign in 2026 on a “Kiwi values document” for all new migrants. “If you don’t want to sign up to those values, we have a clear answer; don’t come,” he said.

The idea isn’t new to the party. In 2018, members voted for a bill requiring newcomers to formally commit to the country’s core values, including respect for gender equality, religious freedom, and New Zealand law.

During the debate, underlying motivations became apparent: one floated a citizenship test so newcomers could “learn how to be disciplined in our country ways” while another warned that certain people, ideas, and nationalities were “not actually kosher with New Zealand’s way of life”. A third insisted the country should not tolerate groups “coming over here and trying to impose their ideas” and that anyone intolerant of New Zealand values should “go back to where they come from”.

Peters stressed this was a sensible approach, like attestations used in Australia and Canada. But listen carefully, and you can hear the dog whistle.

Months before the contest, Peters was signalling his election-year strategy on immigration. In July, he warned of what he called an “alarming development” overseas, where “careless immigration policies” were transforming cities and “changing centuries of development and social life”.

Kiwis, he claimed without evidence, were increasingly worried. (In fact, recent polls suggest the opposite: New Zealanders generally have a positive view of immigration’s economic and cultural contributions.) Nevertheless, he went on: “We intend to turn that problem into a success story, so people do understand that, when you’re coming here, there are some fundamental things you need to sign up to… If you don’t want to sign up to it, don’t come.”

Peters framed his coalition partners as globalists, his own party as nationalist, and pointed to European examples, including England, where newcomers “don’t salute the flag, don’t salute the values of the country, don’t salute the people who were there before them, don’t respect the right to have your own religion.”

In Europe, this messaging is aimed squarely at Muslims. For decades, Peters has aimed it at Asia. (In 2005, he warned New Zealand was becoming an “Asian colony”. In 2016, he proposed interviewing migrants from countries that “treat their women like cattle,” just to “check their attitude” at the border.)

Yet Peters somehow escapes being treated like Europe treats its populist right. Over there, he’d be filed somewhere between Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders. Here, he’s indulged as a roguish throwback. People are fooled because his economic nationalism softens the edges. He insists NZ First are patriots, not xenophobes.

On the face of it, it would be daft to make immigration his wedge issue.

Unlike parts of Europe where cities groan under genuine immigration pressures, New Zealand is in the opposite position: bleeding people overseas. Net migration is down—12,434 in the September 2025 year, 44,000 lower than 2015, and a staggering 120,300 fewer than peak years. More Kiwis are leaving long-term (72,684) than are returning (26,316), and returns haven’t bounced back to pre-Covid levels.

The country is suffering a brain drain, not an influx, and the economy needs more, not fewer, migrants if businesses are to survive.

But Peters isn’t talking numbers. He’s talking who is coming - specifically, migrants from India - framing their arrival as a threat to the national character rather than a solution to an acute demographic and economic problem.

And this puts National and ACT in a bind. Both rely heavily on Indian and Chinese voters, communities that turned up for National in 2023, and which ACT continues to court with evangelical zeal. Both also need immigration to keep the economy from stalling completely.

Luxon, meanwhile, is desperate to land a free-trade agreement with India before the next election, a deal that, awkwardly, requires taking more Indian migrants.

Despite this - or perhaps because of it - all of this points to 2026 being Winston’s year.

In lean times, when people feel anxious about jobs, housing, and the economy, they instinctively look for someone to blame. Scapegoats are a tried and tested tool for Peters. He’s spent decades proving that, regardless of reality, framing a problem in terms of identity, culture, or values commands attention.

And so the two Winstons remain in play. Over the next year, however, it will be the second Winston - the provocateur - who will dominate the stage.

And since we seem to be in a world increasingly ruled by populists, his domestic theatrics will barely create a ripple on the diplomatic circuit.

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