New Zealand’s general election has produced one of the strangest results in the country’s modern history: the party that won the most votes did not win the most seats, and nobody can yet say who will form the next government.
With the preliminary count complete, the centre-left Labour Party finished narrowly ahead in the popular vote, taking 706,443 votes — 29.31 percent — against 705,174 votes, or 29.26 percent, for Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s centre-right National Party. The gap between them is barely 1,269 votes in a country of 5.3 million people.
But under New Zealand’s voting system, the popular vote is only half the story. National’s stronger performance in individual electorate contests — the local races that decide 71 of the 131 seats in the House of Representatives — has given it 42 seats to Labour’s 36. It is the first election since 1981 in which National has won the most seats while losing the popular vote.
Together with its coalition partners, the right-wing-libertarian ACT Party and the nationalist New Zealand First Party, National is projected to hold 67 seats in the 131-seat parliament — a majority of just two. The left-wing bloc of Labour, the Greens and the Indigenous party Te Pāti Māori is projected to hold 57 seats.
That two-seat margin is so thin that neither side is claiming victory. Between 300,000 and 700,000 special votes — ballots cast overseas, or by voters outside their home electorate — have yet to be counted. The Electoral Commission will not publish the official results until November 27, and a small shift in the final tally could wipe out the coalition’s majority altogether.
“It looked like [National] had a pathway to form the next government,” Luxon told supporters in Auckland on Saturday night. But, he added, the race remained “too close to call.”
Labour leader Chris Hipkins, who served briefly as prime minister in 2023, did not concede. “Tonight, New Zealand has spoken,” he told supporters in Wellington. “It may take us a little bit longer to figure out exactly what it is that you’ve said.” He added: “Every vote matters. And every vote must be counted.”
The result is a humbling one for a government that swept to power in 2023 promising change after the Covid-19 pandemic. National’s share of the vote has crashed from 38 percent in 2023 to 29.3 percent. Its partners, ACT and New Zealand First, increased their vote shares to 11 percent and 10 percent respectively — putting them in a stronger position to dictate terms in any coalition talks — while the Greens took 13.3 percent. Several senior National lawmakers, including Finance Minister Nicola Willis and the Speaker of Parliament, Gerry Brownlee, lost their seats.
The election was dominated by the cost of living, stubbornly high unemployment and worries about healthcare — the same pressures that have punished incumbent governments in democracies around the world over the past two years. Voters drifted away from both major parties, which have dominated New Zealand politics for nearly a century, toward smaller parties on the right, the left and the centre.
The biggest winner of the night may be the party that did not exist in parliament before. The centrist Opportunity Party, led by 38-year-old Qiulae Wong, won 6 percent of the vote and is set to enter parliament for the first time — the first entirely new party to do so since 2011. Wong, who applied for the party leadership by answering a job advertisement a year ago, told supporters they had voted “to change New Zealand politics for good.”
Opportunity could yet find itself in the kingmaker’s seat. If the coalition’s two-seat majority does not survive the final count, Luxon would likely need the party’s support — despite having ruled out working with it before the election. The left-wing bloc, too, could reach a majority only with Opportunity’s help.
For now, New Zealand faces weeks of uncertainty. Even after the official results arrive on November 27, coalition negotiations could drag on for weeks before a government is formed — a familiar pattern in a country where no single party has won an outright majority since the current proportional system was introduced in the 1990s, with the sole exception of Labour’s 2020 landslide.
The pattern will look familiar to voters elsewhere. Canada’s Alberta province is voting on Monday in a referendum that could reshape its future inside the federation, while Spain heads to a snap election on November 29 after its prime minister’s housing plan was defeated. In each case, the old certainties — that the biggest party governs, that the result is known on the night — are wearing thin.
Why this matters: New Zealand’s election is a warning shot for incumbent governments everywhere. A governing party can lose nearly a quarter of its support in a single term and still cling to power through the quirks of an electoral system — but only just, and only by depending on smaller partners that are further from the centre. The final count on November 27 will decide whether Luxon’s coalition survives, whether the left can assemble an alternative, or whether a brand-new centrist party ends up deciding who governs a country of five million people.
