The Opportunity Party has hit 4.7 percent support in the latest RNZ-Reid Research poll, its best result yet and roughly double its previous showing. That puts it within margin of error of the 5 percent threshold needed to enter Parliament on party vote alone, without winning an electorate seat.

A second major poll backs up the result. The 1News-Verian poll put Opportunity at 4.6 percent, meaning two separate polling houses now have the party clustered around the threshold rather than clearly above or below it.

When the RNZ poll asked voters whether they preferred a Labour-led or National-led government after the next election, 43.4 percent chose Labour against 37.7 percent for National. Among Opportunity's own voters, the split was starker: 41.1 percent wanted Labour-led government, while just 21.3 percent preferred National-led. But notably, a larger-than-average share of Opportunity supporters refused to pick a side — 22 percent said 'neither' and 15.6 percent said 'don't know', compared with the baseline of 12.8 percent and 6.1 percent.

So the party has a voter base that tilts to the left, but also a sizeable chunk that won't commit to either major party.

Leader Qiulae Wong has said that voter preference "won't drive" the leadership group's decision on which major party to work with after the election. Instead, she's framed a procedural approach: Opportunity would open talks with whichever party wins the most seats, and only turn to the second-largest party if the first negotiation demands too much compromise on Opportunity's core values or policies. RNZ

This "largest party first" stance is a deliberate move to sidestep being seen as a de facto Labour support partner — which the polling figures suggest much of its base already expects. For a party this close to the threshold, the coalition maths cannot be separated from turnout risk. A base that's disproportionately fence-sitting about both major options is a base more prone to drift or stay home if the campaign tightens into a straight Labour-National contest.

The broader picture here is that the Opportunity Party is in the middle of a reinvention. The party — known as The Opportunities Party before its name tweak — has existed for roughly a decade but cycled through five leaders. Wong, 38, has been cast as the face of a "refreshed" version, one that has managed to turn what had been a minor-party footnote into a genuine poll performer with real implications for seat counts. RNZ

The RNZ-Reid Research result stands up. Roy Morgan's New Zealand poll for June 2026 put Opportunity at 6 percent, a level the pollster calculated would give eight seats in Parliament. Roy Morgan Two different polling houses, using different methods, now have Opportunity around or above the electoral threshold rather than in the low single digits where minor parties normally sit before they fade away entirely.

For anyone working through the MMP maths — that's Mixed Member Proportional, the voting system New Zealand uses — consistency across polls matters more than any single result. A party polling at 4–6 percent that clears 5 percent on election night changes how government gets formed, because it adds a genuinely uncommitted block of seats to whichever side can meet its demands. A party that falls just under 5 percent sees its votes effectively wasted unless it has also won an electorate seat — the only way minor parties like ACT and the Greens have survived when poll numbers dropped.

Here's the thing Wong faces. Her insistence that the leadership group, not voters, will decide Opportunity's coalition partner is a familiar minor-party line — New Zealand First and the Greens have both said similar things about negotiating on policy substance rather than pre-committing to one side. But whether that discipline holds when an actual post-election negotiation happens is untested, because Opportunity has never before been in a position where its seat count could plausibly change who forms government. The real story is the party's shift from marginal to prospective kingmaker — however narrow that margin — ahead of whatever individual voters happen to say in a poll.