New Zealand is eleven weeks out from an election and the mood of the electorate is unmistakably sour. Many New Zealanders tell pollsters the economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful, that society is broken, and that the country is headed in the wrong direction. And yet the two main parties of the left are offering something conspicuously careful.
In an age of public discontent, the left is running the least discontented campaign in the country. Why?
Tonight I spoke in Wellington on a panel organised by the New Zealand Fabian Society on the topic of “leftwing populism”. What follows is essentially my speaking notes. Or you can watch the video of the meeting here: “Left Populism At Home and Abroad: Possibilities and Problems”
----
In an age of discontent, where is the left?
In Ipsos New Zealand’s 2024 populism survey, 65% agreed that “the economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful”. Another 63% agreed that “the political and economic elite don’t care about hard-working people”, 58% said “New Zealand society is broken”, and 66% agreed that the country “needs a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful”.
Those are extraordinary numbers for a country that still likes to think of itself as egalitarian, moderate and relatively contented.
Yet the political left in that same country is cautious, managerial, respectable — and strangely uncomfortable talking in those terms. That is the puzzle. New Zealand increasingly has the public demand for left populism. What it lacks is the political supply.
Anti-establishment anger doesn’t automatically become progressive. Somebody has to explain that anger, identify its causes and organise it politically. If the left doesn’t do that, someone else will.
What is left populism?
Political scientist Cas Mudde’s influential definition treats populism as a “thin-centred ideology” that divides society between “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite”, and holds that politics should express the general will of the people.
That is a useful starting point because “populism” has become one of those words that is usually an accusation rather than a description. We use it to mean irresponsible, simplistic, demagogic, authoritarian, nationalism, or sometimes just policies that respectable people don’t like.
But populism itself is about the political division between the people and an elite.
Many of the radical-right movements we now call populist combine that anti-elite politics with nationalism and authoritarianism. They tell people they’re losing control not only because of elites at the top but because of outsiders below: immigrants, minorities, welfare recipients, the culturally alien.
Leftwing populism, in contrast, directs the anger elsewhere: towards concentrated economic and political power. Its targets are monopoly corporations, landlords, the very wealthy, corporate lobbyists, political insiders and institutions captured by vested interests. In that version of populism, the migrant down the road isn’t the problem. The focus is on those who possess disproportionate economic and political power. The political question is therefore not simply whether anger exists, but who gets blamed for the conditions producing it.
New Zealand’s populist mood
The Ipsos results give us a striking combination of attitudes. As noted above, 65% think our economy is rigged for the rich and powerful and 66% want a strong leader to take the country back from them. But only 23% agreed with the proposition that New Zealand would be stronger if immigration stopped. Just 29% agreed that immigrants take jobs away from “real” New Zealanders.
So New Zealand’s populist mood has been much more strongly anti-elite than anti-immigrant. This shows that populism doesn’t have to be rightwing. There is no iron law saying public discontent has to become Trumpism, Faragism or some local equivalent.
Go back to 2016. A UMR poll that I reported at the time put Bernie Sanders on 77% support among New Zealanders, compared with just 8% for Donald Trump. At the very least, it suggested that an appetite for political insurgency in New Zealand didn’t have to take a rightwing form.
More recent evidence suggests something else. There aren’t merely two ideological New Zealands any more. There are increasingly two experiences of New Zealand democracy. If you’re financially comfortable, the system still mostly works. If you’re struggling, it increasingly looks rigged.
The Helen Clark Foundation’s recent research on social cohesion illustrates this divide starkly. Prosperous New Zealanders are much more likely to trust government, believe elections are fair and feel that institutions work for people like them. Struggling New Zealanders are dramatically less likely to agree.
For example, 56% of prosperous respondents trusted government to do the right thing, compared with only 22% of struggling respondents. And while 62% of prosperous respondents regarded elections as fair, only 35% of struggling respondents did.
At least some of the current populist mood therefore grows out of people’s actual experience of the economy and democracy. It isn’t simply being manufactured by clever politicians or algorithms.
So, New Zealand doesn’t lack a constituency for progressive populism. It lacks political organisations prepared to mobilise it.
Why isn’t the left there?
The first explanation is the decline of class organisation. The traditional left wasn’t simply an electoral brand that periodically offered voters more generous policies. It was embedded in organised labour. It was built through unions, workplaces, local party branches, working-class communities, cooperatives, clubs and a whole ecosystem of institutions in which people understood themselves as members of a social class with common interests.
That world has been hollowed out. Labour gradually ceased to be an organisation embedded in organised labour and became much more professionalised, parliamentary and managerial.
This wasn’t uniquely New Zealand. From the 1970s and 1980s onwards, parties of the left across the Western world became increasingly middle-class political vehicles. The left itself changed class location. Its activists and MPs became increasingly drawn from university graduates, professionals, public servants, NGOs, academia and metropolitan cultural institutions.
Many of those people are themselves insecure or poorly paid. But the change in who makes up the left nonetheless changed its language, priorities and instincts.
The legacy of 1984
In New Zealand there was an especially important twist. The left lost the great economic argument of the 1980s. Except that here, the political left didn’t merely lose the arguments – it actually administered them in the neoliberal revolution carried out by the fourth Labour Government.
That left an enormous ideological scar. The party historically created by organised labour became one of the principal architects of the economic order that weakened organised labour.
Having lost much of the economic terrain, the broader left increasingly concentrated on social liberalism, identity, culture, environmentalism and foreign policy. Meanwhile economic redistribution and class politics receded. You can see the result in how the term “leftwing” is now understood. When I ask university students what being leftwing means, the answers tend to be things like anti-racism, diversity, gender equality, LGBTQ rights, environmentalism and political correctness. They very rarely say working class, poverty, unions, ownership or collective economic struggle.
A slightly provocative way of putting it is this: The right won the economic argument of the 1980s and kept the winnings. The left won the social argument and mistook it for the whole of politics. So although the left in this country became extremely fluent in the language of recognition, representation, procedure and expertise, it became much less fluent in the language of wages, ownership, rents, monopoly and economic conflict.
The answer for the left isn’t to decide that racism, gender, sexuality suddenly don’t matter. It is to reconnect those struggles to a wider politics of material redistribution and class power.
Did MMP absorb the revolt?
There is another explanation for why New Zealand hasn’t experienced the same populist upheavals as Britain, Europe or the United States. We may have had our anti-establishment convulsion early. Between 1984 and 1993, New Zealand tore up its post-war economic settlement, especially in economic reform. Then the public took revenge on the political establishment by tearing up the electoral system. In one sense, MMP was our Brexit.
The analogy only goes so far, of course. But both were rebellions against political establishments that large sections of the electorate thought had stopped listening.
MMP absorbed a huge amount of anti-establishment energy. It opened Parliament to smaller parties, gave discontented voters somewhere to go, and ultimately left Labour and National in much healthier condition than their counterparts in Britain or the United States.
For thirty years, that pressure valve worked remarkably well. I’m not convinced it’s working any more.
Labour’s problem
That takes us to the parties actually on offer in 2026.
Labour now talks more fluently about market concentration, excessive profits and economic unfairness. Chris Hipkins is increasingly comfortable with economic language that would have seemed unusually ideological for Labour a few years ago.
But Labour has two problems. The first is credibility. It had six years in government and, for three of those, an outright parliamentary majority. Yet he supermarket duopoly survived. Housing remained dysfunctional. The banks remained extraordinarily powerful.
The problem of what I call “Broken New Zealand” only got worse under Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins. Yes Labour diagnosed plenty of problems, commissioned inquiries into them, but generally just administered broken markets rather than fixing them.
The second problem is strategic. Campaign strategists and commentators have described Labour’s approach this year as a “small-target” strategy: minimise political risk and controversy while allowing voters to continue judging the Government.
That may be tactically rational. But it is almost the precise opposite of populism. Populism says there is a conflict and asks voters to choose sides. Labour’s strategy says: don’t worry, we’ll manage things somewhat better. Yet in a moment that may require something closer to the radicalism of 1935, management won’t cut it.
The Greens’ opportunity
The Greens have almost the opposite problem. They already possess some of a left-populist policy programme: wealth taxation, windfall taxes, stronger action against monopolies, public ownership, housing intervention and redistribution. And Chlöe Swarbrick herself has put the argument bluntly: “Anything other than material redistribution is tokenism.” But the Greens haven’t consistently organised their politics around that proposition.
Compare what has happened elsewhere. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned relentlessly on an affordability agenda (rents, buses, childcare and groceries) while identifying landlords, corporations and concentrated wealth as political adversaries.
Zack Polanski has pursued something similar since becoming leader of the Green Party of England and Wales last year, combining climate politics with the cost of living and giving the party a much more insurgent, anti-wealth-concentration identity. Since his election as leader, the party has moved from around 10% support into the mid-to-high teens in a number of polls, while membership has more than tripled.
That doesn’t prove eco-populism caused the surge, nor are either Mamdani or Polanski templates New Zealand should simply import. But the comparison shows what can happen when material politics becomes the organising story rather than one policy area among many. If climate politics, inequality, housing and economic insecurity are all parts of the same story about who has power and who pays, the Greens should say so.
What would left populism actually look like?
So what might a New Zealand left populism actually look like? First, attack the broken markets that are ripping off ordinary New Zealanders. These are the structures where economic power allows wealth to be extracted without producing corresponding value: supermarket concentration, the banking oligopoly, electricity pricing, housing rent extraction and firms protected from real competition. Make those structures visible.
Second, democratise the political system. If you tell people an elite has too much power, you need actual remedies:
1. Regulate lobbying
2. Reform political finance
3. Close the revolving door between government and vested interests
4. Increase transparency around political access and influence
Otherwise anti-elitism is just theatre.
Third, a leftwing populism would focus on the following tangible issues:
1. Cheaper electricity.
2. Affordable homes.
3. Cheap or free healthcare.
4. Higher wages.
5. Broken monopolies.
6. Taxing unearned wealth.
These are things people can recognise as improvements in their own lives. Not forty policies and a beautifully balanced fiscal document. A small number of propositions relentlessly explained.
And fourth, chase the non-voters rather than simply obsessing over swing voters. One of the largest political constituencies in this country is the people who don’t participate at all. They are disproportionately younger, poorer and Māori. These are precisely some of the groups recording the strongest levels of political alienation and anti-establishment sentiment. A genuinely insurgent left would ask how to bring some of those people into politics, rather than simply fighting National over the same relatively small pool of swing voters.
The challenge for the left
There are obvious dangers in all of this, because populism simplifies. Not every social problem is caused by a villain. It can also become anti-pluralist. “The people” aren’t homogeneous, and political opponents don’t become illegitimate simply because they disagree with the majority.
And populism can become a substitute for organisation. A charismatic politician, an anti-elite message and a successful election campaign don’t rebuild unions, community organisations or working-class political power. That may be the deepest problem of all.
So I’m not arguing that the New Zealand left needs to become more demagogic. It needs to become more political. It needs to recover conflict over economic power, rebuild a working class constituency, and give anti-establishment New Zealanders a progressive explanation for why the country increasingly doesn’t seem to work for them.
The anger already exists. Yet if the politicians of the left just say the system is fundamentally sound and merely needs somewhat more competent management, while a party like NZ First says the system is rigged and promises to tear it up, we shouldn’t be surprised when the more populist right wins.
So, the opportunity for the left is to offer a different insurgency. And it’s to say that, yes, parts of this system really are rigged but the answer isn’t to turn against migrants, minorities or other people with little power. Instead a leftwing populism would challenge those who actually possess disproportionate power.
Whether the New Zealand left is prepared to take that possibility seriously before somebody else captures this mood is the question.
Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project
But yet you Bryce Edward's are hypocritical in your criticism, because you also will not touch the money system issue.
If NZ doesn't get a left populist soon the right populist will be laughing all the way to the ballot box! Struggling kiwis will have already been captured by the right. Might be too late already.....
Iain is correct we also need to address the issue that cutting social programmes is a choice not a balancing of the books imperative, and we can fund those programmes in a much more efficient way.