This piece is one in a series of profiles of electoral parties in the lead up to the 2026 General Election.
Just as Wiremu Tamihana was declared “Kingmaker” in the 1850s, “Old Racist Uncle” Winston Peters prepares to tip the scales of New Zealand’s future. Sitting at just under 10% in popularity as of 11 March, Winston Peters’ New Zealand First maintains a careful balance of reactionary nationalist populism and popular nationalist reaction, all the while courting the likes of the extractive industry and the tobacco lobby. New Zealand First occupies a distinct place in New Zealand’s parliamentary politics. Since its foundation in 1993 by Winston Peters, the party has repeatedly acted as a balance-of-power force within the proportional representation system. The party is typically described as nationalist, populist, and socially conservative. It is also known for its advocacy of economic intervention and opposition to aspects of neoliberal globalisation.
New Zealand First emerged as a vehicle of Winston Peters’ dissatisfaction with the National Party following disputes over neoliberal economic reforms introduced during the early 1990s that saw him removed from cabinet, and Peters’ defamation of a National Party donor that saw him kicked out of the National Party. His resignation, coming soon after, kicked off a by-election in Tauranga. Peters won as an independent and soon established New Zealand First as a populist alternative to the two major parties, attracting voters dissatisfied with economic deregulation and political elites linked to his brazen theatrics and bullish political performance.
The party quickly gained prominence under New Zealand’s new mixed-member proportional (MMP) electoral system, winning 17 seats in the 1996 election and holding the balance of power, which allowed it to form a coalition government with National. Since then, New Zealand First has repeatedly played a “kingmaker” role in coalition negotiations and has alternated between alliances with both National and Labour governments. The party has periodically fallen out of parliament – most notably in 2008 and 2020 – but returned after subsequent elections, most recently joining the National-led coalition government after the 2023 election.
The emergence of NZ First cannot be separated from the profound economic restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s. The neoliberal reforms implemented in this period by both the governments of the New Zealand Labour Party and the New Zealand National Party were wide-sweeping and catastrophic for the working class of the country. These included: deregulation of finance, privatisation of state assets, labour market liberalisation, and trade liberalisation.
These policies dramatically altered the Keynesian structure of the New Zealand economy, where direct government control of the economy was commonplace, and the state regularly intervened in economic issues. With both the mainstream left and right implementing neoliberal reform, the weakening of traditional social-democratic organisations created space for new political formations that mobilise discontent without challenging capitalism itself. This political crisis, in which these customary parties lost legitimacy, enabled New Zealand First to carve out a niche. With the deindustrialisation of much of the country’s rural economies, the firesale of national infrastructure, and the restructuring of the New Zealand welfare system that saw poverty crash back into public life, New Zealand First drew support from voters who felt betrayed by the neoliberal turn, particularly in regional and provincial areas that experienced both Rogernomics and Ruthenasia.
With neoliberalism embedded in the New Zealand political landscape, 2023 onwards has left us with a general lack of humanity by both Christopher Luxon’s National Party and David Seymour’s ACT. The tide of feelings is left to be expressed by New Zealand First’s muppets, Adolf Statler and Heinrich Waldorf, in Winston Peters and Shane Jones, theatrical reactionaries who present a perfect colonial past while scaremongering on the threat gender minorities, migrants, unions, communists and Māori as enemies to peace, community and national security.
Recent news coverage highlights New Zealand First’s influence within the current Coalition Government and its role in controversial culture wars. The party supported a bill to recognise English as an official language alongside te reo Māori and New Zealand Sign Language, implicitly pandering to a constructed grievance community chasing phantoms of inequality while communities are pulped and filleted by the attacks on trans rights, public services, and Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The party has also proposed transphobic legislation defining gender strictly by biological sex and advocated for tighter immigration policies to address labour market pressures and infrastructure strain.
A socialist focus on such parties best understands them not only through their programme but also through their class composition and political function within capitalism. From this perspective, New Zealand First represents a petty-bourgeois nationalist group organised on populist grounds, a small-business-centric and big business interest group front that channels popular working class anger generated by neoliberal restructuring while remaining firmly committed to the framework of parliamentary capitalism. Though not every exasperated petty bourgeois could have become Uncle, there is a particle of Uncle lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois.
New Zealand First is thus a cross-class entity that stokes anger at minority groups, migrants, Māori, gender minorities, and the like to capture working-class energy and channel it into collaborative structures that enable the patriarchal colonial capitalist order to maintain relevance in a world that has rapidly changed in form and function.
