Chris Trotter: Election 2026 - when the tail is growing large enough to wag the ideological dog

From the perspective of New Zealand’s two largest parties, the first MMP election in 1996 was also the worst.

Between them, National and Labour accounted for just 62.06% of the popular vote. Pundits opined that this historically low two-party share reflected in more-or-less equal measure the novelty of the new electoral system and a substantial minority of the electorate’s emphatic rejection of politics as usual.

Brian Easton: Are We Sure That We Have A Well-Functioning System Of Government?

Why doesn’t our government reflect New Zealanders; why doesn’t Parliament make them?

There will be many claims over the next few months that the minor parties will hold the major parties/politics/New Zealanders to ransom. That reflects a misunderstanding of how our system works. Any ransom occurs because the two main parties will not contemplate a ‘grand coalition’ of the two forming the government. It has happened in the past – during the First World War and the Great Depression – but nobody considers that possibility nowadays.