The first published political poll in nearly a month has the National-led coalition still able to form a government but with both of its support parties losing ground, leaving the centre-right bloc with a thinner buffer six months out from the 2026 general election.
The Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll, released on Tuesday and reported by RNZ, found that ACT and New Zealand First both went backwards while the National Party itself essentially held station. Together the three coalition partners would still bring 62 MPs into the next Parliament, three fewer than in the previous Curia survey in April. The combined opposition of Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori would land on 58 seats, up three.
Labour remained the single most popular party on 31.9 per cent, although it dropped 1.5 points from last month. National edged up just 0.2 points to 30 per cent, putting the two major parties within the margin of error of one another. New Zealand First fell 1.9 points to 11.7 per cent and ACT took the heaviest knock of any party, sliding 2.5 points to 6.5 per cent. The Green Party climbed 1.9 points to 9.7 per cent and Te Pāti Māori rose 1.5 points to 4.1 per cent, leaving the Māori party hovering just below the five per cent threshold and reliant on retaining electorate seats.
Translated into Parliament, those numbers would deliver 39 National MPs, 15 from New Zealand First and 8 from ACT, for a 62-strong governing arrangement. Labour would return 41 MPs and would still find itself locked out of office even with the Greens on 12 and Te Pāti Māori on 5. The result is a Parliament that almost exactly mirrors the present arithmetic, with the coalition able to keep governing only because the Māori vote is split between Te Pāti Māori and the new Te Tai Tokerau Party launched by Mariameno Kapa-Kingi.
On the preferred prime minister question, Christopher Luxon retook the lead with 21.5 per cent, up 1 point. Labour leader Chris Hipkins dropped 2.7 points to 19 per cent, narrowing the gap once again to within the margin of error. Winston Peters held third spot on 11.6 per cent, down 0.5 points. None of the three is anywhere near the kind of personal popularity that would settle the contest in advance.
Curia conducted the poll for the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union between Sunday 3 May and Thursday 7 May, surveying 1,000 adult New Zealanders by landline, mobile and online. The maximum margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 per cent. The decided sample was 914 voters, with 49 respondents undecided and 37 declining to answer the party-vote question. The survey was completed before Judith Collins delivered her valedictory in the House this week and before the government’s announcement that it would change climate law to halt the Mike Smith tort case, so neither event has yet washed through to the public mood.
The trend across the past three Curia readings is what will worry the smaller coalition partners. ACT has now fallen for two surveys in a row and is sitting at almost half the support it polled at the 2023 election. New Zealand First, which had been benefiting from the fuel-rationing debate and from Winston Peters’ high media profile, has given back most of those gains in a single month. National, by contrast, has flatlined within a tight band around 30 per cent for most of this term, well short of the 38 per cent it took into government but high enough that the coalition arithmetic continues to work, just.
For Labour the picture is more ambiguous. Hovering close to 32 per cent, the party is comfortably the largest single bloc but has not been able to convert opposition discontent over Fees Free, the Policing Amendment Bill or the cost of living into a clear pathway to the Treasury benches. Even adding the Greens’ 12 seats and Te Pāti Māori’s 5 leaves the centre-left short, which is why the strategic conversation inside Labour now centres on whether it can pick up provincial electorates currently held by National and on what kind of working arrangement it could reach with smaller potential entrants such as the Opportunity Party and Te Tai Tokerau.
The Greens will take some quiet satisfaction from being the only party in the poll to gain ground in both the party-vote question and against expectations. At 9.7 per cent the party is now within striking distance of the double-digit territory it last reached during the 2023 campaign, and its 12 prospective MPs would give it real weight in any negotiation.
With election day still around six months away there is plenty of time for the picture to shift again, particularly once Parliament rises for the winter recess and the campaign begins in earnest. What this poll confirms is that the contest is genuinely live, that the coalition’s majority is no longer comfortable, and that small swings between now and October are likely to decide whether the present government survives.
If you have not yet worked out where you sit across the parties on the issues likely to dominate the campaign, take a few minutes with the Newswire voting tool and see which party platforms most closely match your own answers.
Where do you think the election will land in October — comfortable coalition return, narrow Labour-led change, or something messier? Drop your read on it in the comments below.
See also NZ Election Sidekick — Newswire’s interactive poll tracker and seat projection for the 2026 general election.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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