New poll suggests the coalition Government has a problem, not just National
Wednesday, 24 June 2026
ANALYSIS: Christopher Luxon is used to bad polls now.
They are no longer bolts from the blue, surprises in what should be the calm waters of a first term. They come up most months, and more often than not they have a “2” in front of them.
Luxon tells us he doesn’t comment on polls, says something about the country being in a tough spot, and then moves right along. Sometimes the media pack moves on too, sometimes there is a day or so of further speculation about his leadership.
It seems unlikely that the 1News poll released on Tuesday night will put his leadership in question once more. The April confidence vote seems to have shut down that talk for now. And even though this is a 1 News poll ‒ a poll traditionally kind to National, and a poll that more swing voters will see than any other ‒ it is also far from the first to put National at 29%.
Read more:
Coalition would be gone at election, Opportunity nears 5% new TVNZ poll suggests
‘Not good enough’: National president Sylvia Wood says her party must beat Labour in party vote
Indeed it essentially brings 1News’ ranking of National in line with other pollsters, including The Post/Freshwater Strategy’s poll.
But the point of staying on as leader for Luxon is not making it to November, it is making it all the way to 2027. And this poll suggests a broader-brush rejection of the whole coalition, not just the prime minister that leads it.
Working out exact seat distributions is complicated, and thus the actual question who would govern on these numbers is difficult.
TVNZ’s calculations suggest, implausibly, that Te Pāti Māori would win six seats, creating an overhang that would favour the left bloc and send them into power. It seems very unlikely that the party will not at least lose Te Tai Tonga and Te Tai Tokerau, where the MPs elected under its banner in 2023 are now standing against them.
Yet recalculating these results provides little comfort to the coalition.
If we assume TPM win the four seats it has current MPs in, the left bloc can still govern with 62 seats total in a 122 seat Parliament. And if we assume the party holds on to just one seat, we hit a deadlock with each party holding 60 seats - and thus no path to power for the right.
Indeed, the only way the coalition returns on numbers like these is if TPM wins no electorate seats at all, which gives the parties of Government a one-seat majority.
All this is ignoring the new elephant in the room: Opportunity (formerly TOP), which have an incredible 4.6% in this poll. Obviously if these results were played out exactly and Opportunity didn’t win a seat, that would all be wasted. But it is incredibly close to 5%.
If we read Opportunity as a broadly left-wing party opposed to the current coalition ‒ a reading that seems fair given its policy stances ‒ then the cumulative vote for parties opposed to the coalition is 51.4%, compared to just 46% for the coalition. There is, it seems, quite a bit of anti-Government energy in the populace.
Perhaps this poll is a one-off and Opportunity will head back down to the twos and threes. But if it is is not and Opportunity does come to Parliament, reassembling the current coalition becomes all but impossible.
Indeed, it is good practice here to remember this is all only one poll. There are others that have better news for the coalition, if not for National itself. Labour itself had a pretty rough ride in this poll, despite finally launching some policy, and Chris Hipkins is behind in Preferred Prime Minister. There is a significant proportion of voters in the polls that are undecided.
But it is also worth remembering that New Zealand has never had a three-way coalition, and has never quite had a Government like this, with a major party so weak and two coalition partners openly fighting for a similar segment of the vote. It makes total sense for NZ First and ACT to squabble over the vote that sits to the populist right of National, but for the coalition to return, National will need to focus on the vote that sits to its left. And to do that it will need to be heard over all the noise, something it has struggled with. Given these very new dynamics, the old rules about first-term governments usually winning a second start to feel a touch out of date.
Luxon does actually comment on polls every now and then. Back in April after another shocker he noted to journalists that despite National’s poor numbers, his Government would return.
“Any polls, any public polls that I’ve seen, have said that this coalition Government would be re-elected if there was an election today,” Luxon said.
Not any more.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said TOP had 4.7% in the poll; it had 4.6%. (Amended: June 24, 2026 at 8.20am)