New Zealand Election Too Close to Call as Special Votes Are Counted
New Zealand's 2026 election has not produced a decisive result, and the outcome will remain open until several hundred thousand votes are counted. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon called the result "too close to call" and said special votes would need to be counted before negotiations could begin, according to The Guardian.
On preliminary results, neither the incumbent right-leaning coalition nor the opposition left bloc won a decisive victory. With nearly all regular votes counted, Luxon's National party held 42 seats, the ACT party 13 and New Zealand First 12, a combined 67 seats. That was enough for the three parties to govern together. National was the largest party in parliament, leading Labour by 0.02 percentage points in the party vote. Labour won 35 seats, the Greens 16, Te Pāti Māori five and the Opportunity party seven.
New Zealand uses a system called mixed-member proportional representation, or MMP, in which voters cast two ballots: one for a local electorate MP and one for a party. Parties that win a share of the party vote above a set threshold enter parliament, and Opportunity, a centrist party led by Qiulae Wong, cleared that bar with 5.9 per cent. It is the first new party to meet the threshold since New Zealand adopted MMP in 1996.
Special votes are the main reason the count is unfinished. They include overseas votes and ballots cast outside a voter's own electorate, and ABC News reported an estimated 700,000 remained to be counted after election day. In 2023, about 600,000 special votes were cast, around 21 per cent of the total, and they shifted the balance: Te Pāti Māori and the Greens gained three seats between them. Official results are scheduled for release on 27 November.
The party vote has moved sharply. CNN reported that National's share fell from 38 per cent in 2023 to 29.3 per cent in the preliminary count. Labour stood at 29.27 per cent, according to ABC's live coverage. RNZ reported that Labour had not conceded after election night. Early voting had reached 1,250,057 ballots by the Tuesday before election day, according to Electoral Commission data cited by Reuters.
