Is Prime Minister Christopher Luxon finally on the way out? A Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll out today reportedly puts the National Party on only 28% support. And rightwing commentator Matthew Hooton says today in the Herald that the senior leadership of the party “need to set up a conference call amongst themselves this weekend” to start the process of replacing him. Hooton says that after Luxon’s extremely poor performance over the US-Iran War, Luxon is clearly now “a threat to national security”.
Today’s 28% opinion poll
National’s drop to about 28% support is expected to come out this morning when the Taxpayers’ Union releases their regular Curia poll. The figure is being reported by Stuff, which says the figure has been confirmed by “multiple media outlets”. This is because the poll results have already been provided to National MPs. The polling company, Curia, also carries out polling commissioned by the National Party.
Stuff reports this morning that polling pressure is building, with “some MPs acknowledging that continued poor polling could increase pressure on Luxon”, and that this “latest poll is likely to renew leadership speculation within National”
Herald political editor Thomas Coughlan has also reported on the poll leak today and Luxon’s renewed vulnerability, saying “there is speculation continued poor polling could see him resign”. He also reports that after seeing the poll results, National “MPs acknowledged that there would be scrutiny placed on Luxon after such a poor performance”.
For context on the poor poll result, Coughlan points out that National received 38.06% at the 2023 election, and that this new result would only be about 2.5% “above the party’s performance in the 2020 election (25.58%)”.
Winston Peters appears to have seen the poll, and was asked about it this morning and said: “It is not good, is it?”, and added “You can’t say anything else. It is not the end of everything. But those of us who are not in the National Party, on this matter, on the outside, it is not good, no.”
Could Luxon really get rolled?
Although it got very little media coverage at the time, there was supposedly a coup attempt on Luxon by Chris Bishop late last year. Coughlan summarises this today: “Luxon survived an embryonic coup from Senior Minister Chris Bishop at the end of last year. The coup was stopped before it got off the ground.” Similarly, Stuff says today, “an attempted leadership move involving senior minister Chris Bishop was halted before it progressed”.
Coughlan also reports today that Bishop might not be in a very good position to revive his coup attempt this week: “Bishop is scheduled to travel to India shortly, which would mean his absence from next Tuesday’s caucus meeting.”
Hooton’s scathing column today in the Herald
Matthew Hooton explains in the Herald today that Luxon only survived as Prime Minister last year because, “in a conflict of ambition”, his rivals can’t agree who to support for the top job: “he retains the job title only because his front bench can’t agree on which of them should succeed him”, and so their “consequent inability to resolve matters among themselves is all that saved Luxon”.
Hooton lists all of the ministers that he thinks would do a better job than Luxon: “Nicola Willis, Chris Bishop, Simeon Brown, Erica Stanford, Paul Goldsmith, Louise Upston, Mark Mitchell or Chris Penk”. He suggests that the role of Finance Minister should also change: “any of the others on the list would be no worse than Willis as Minister of Finance.”
Everyone around the Prime Minister knows that he’s dragging National and the Government down, according to Hooton: “The view he is floundering is shared by some of his most senior ministers.”
Hooton is equally scathing of senior National figures who are refusing to take action to fix the problem, saying “Those senior MPs have obligations as members of the National Party to force Luxon to resign”. Such politicians, Hooton says, owe their party and country an attempt to fix the problem, but “the contenders seem to have decided their own personal ambitions are better served by scrapping it out in opposition to decide who among them might become Prime Minister in 2029 or beyond.”
Luxon as “a threat to national security”
The argument made by Hooton is that Luxon needs to go due to his extremely poor performance on New Zealand reaction to Trump’s military strikes on Iran: “For nearly 40 years, I have listened to prime ministers do morning radio interviews and press conferences, yet never have I witnessed a more pathetic performance than Luxon’s on Monday, especially on matters as fundamental as war and peace.”
Hooton’s description of Luxon’s performance continued: “Luxon was reduced to utter incoherence… no prime minister I can remember has so failed to maintain even the minimal sense of authority required to do their job as Luxon on Monday.” And he says that Luxon’s “inability to lead and communicate is itself a threat to national security.”
Here’s how he explains this: “That is not hyperbole but draws on an observation by former Australian Cabinet minister Peter Garrett – also lead singer of Midnight Oil – that he had to back Julia Gillard for prime minister over the incumbent Kevin Rudd for that very reason. Rudd’s character, he decided, was such that should Australia face a serious security threat, his vanity and megalomania would lead to decisions that would worsen not mitigate the danger.”
“National’s top MPs might at least ensure New Zealand has a leader with the basic competence to lead us through the worst global crisis since World War II and the economic trials, including stagflation, that war in the Middle East inevitably brings.”
And if you’re not yet convinced of Hooton’s extreme unhappiness with Luxon, he also spoke out this week on a podcast, saying that National “can’t win an election with Luxon. They will become the first one-term National government. He is a uniquely incompetent person, as Prime Minister. He is by far the worst prime minister in my lifetime from any party… The senior ministers all know they have no respect for him at all. His own staff have no respect for him. His own polling and PR operation understands that National is doomed with him as leader… No one in the business community has any regard.”
And explaining further the argument that Luxon is a threat to New Zealand’s national security, Hooton explained on the podcast: “He simply does not have the capability to lead the country when times are difficult. And if New Zealand was physically under attack, you know the invasion fleet was halfway across the Tasman or whatever, or we were under serious cyber-attack or whatever it was, a serious attack that we haven’t had since the 1940s. I look at every prime minister in my lifetime and they would have done the right thing, every one of them in different ways. Lange or Clark would have got George Bush and Ronald Reagan to come to our defence. They would have managed that. Luxon, no. Would Luxon, if New Zealand came under serious threat, as we have seen over the last two days, he could not lead the country. And he would make the situation worse.”
National is in “panic mode”, but the party remains paralysed
The editor of The Post and Sunday Star Times, Tracy Watkins, has recently written that National is in “panic mode” after coming back from the holiday break. Here’s what she says about things having got worse over recent months: “the holiday chatter hasn’t been kind to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. People ended 2025 grumpy and they’ve started 2026 even grumpier. Prices continue to climb, pay packets aren’t keeping pace, and the Christmas credit card bills are now due. For many, the ‘green shoots’ the Government keeps hailing have not improved their own circumstances. So, they’re blaming National. According to the latest The Post/Freshwater Strategy poll, the PM’s favourability rating took a significant hit over the break. His personal approval tumbled 14 points since December. Since August 2023, Luxon has dropped a total of 25 points on this metric.”
Like Hooton, she notes that National MPs are well aware that Luxon is dragging them down, but can’t bring themselves to act on it: “alarm bells have reached a crescendo, yet the party remains paralysed. Replacing a first-term PM months out from an election is a high-stakes gamble that seasoned operators almost always advise against. The prevailing wisdom is to hold tight: the theory is that an improving economy and falling interest rates will eventually do the heavy lifting.”
However, Watkins believes that the realisation of National caucus job losses at the election might start to focus the minds of the backbenches, even amongst those who feel safe: “they want the big jobs and the chance to drive real change. A second term in power without a Cabinet portfolio is a deeply unattractive prospect, especially if a third term looks like an even bigger ask. It doesn’t just stall ministerial ambitions, it kills career prospects. A CV extolling nine years as a backbencher is rarely a pathway to the corporate boards or directorships they aspire to. The longer National’s polling gets stuck in the low 30s – or even lower – the more restless the caucus will get.”
However, even senior National MPs are looking at losing their seats in Parliament this year. Broadcaster Duncan Garner explained recently: “if National sits at around 30%, an unlikely but possible scenario is that National fails to get any list MPs. They’d all lose their jobs after one term of Luxon’s leadership. The highest profile casualties of that outcome would be Nicola Willis and Speaker Gerry Brownlee.”
Garner thinks the dropping polls will start talk of a leadership change: “If National’s party vote collapses towards the low 30s, or worse into the 20s, the arithmetic gets ugly very fast, and Luxon could cost his finance minister her list place. In politics, it’s not just about who’s ahead, it’s about who survives. And if the party heads into the 20s before the election, does National chopper in Erica Stanford like Labour did with Jacinda Ardern? It has to be in the thinking.”
Richard Harman wrote on Wednesday that National is vulnerable to declines in support, saying if the next polls “show National falling further than what it is currently doing (such as if its support were to go below 30 per cent), anxiety among some backbenchers might well turn to full-blown panic. Once again, the focus will turn on the Prime Minister, who has hardly helped things this week with his confused accounts of where New Zealand stands on the United States-Israeli actions.”
The most remarkable thing about National’s crisis isn’t Luxon’s incompetence — that’s been evident for some time. It’s that the entire senior leadership of the party can see the problem, privately acknowledge the problem, and yet remain frozen by competing ambitions. As Hooton puts it, they’d rather fight it out in opposition than take the risk of acting now.
The Iran crisis has merely accelerated a trajectory that was already clear. The question is no longer whether Luxon is up to the job. It’s whether anyone in National has the nerve to do something about it before the party’s polling reaches a point from which there is no recovery.
Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project
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