The 2026 election will be held on November 7, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced today.
Luxon made the announcement at the National Party caucus retreat in Christchurch. He said it continued a tradition of setting the election date early in the year to ensure New Zealanders have certainty.
“Most of our elections have been late October, early November. So when you look at the international events beforehand, when you look at the national events, sporting events, that was the logical time.
“I think most commentators kind of came to the same conclusion,” he said.
Although hardly a surprise, Luxon ruled out working with Labour, the Greens or Te Pāti Māori following the 2026 election.
“We’re not going to be working with the Greens, they have a radical left-wing agenda that will only accelerate that spend more.
“We won’t be working with Te Pāti Māori because they’ve got a separatist agenda,” he said.
He attacked Labour’s policy of a capital gains tax, saying it would be “just the start of policies that punish Kiwis for doing the right thing about saving and investing, because you can always be sure that after Labour spends everything they’ve got, they will come straight for more of your money”.
Luxon said he was not worried about the length of time coalition talks might take.
“I’m confident we’d be able to sort that out. As you’ve seen, we are going to make the case very strongly for a National-led government,” Luxon said.
Addressing concerns about the coalition’s own disunity, Luxon said the current coalition worked well.
“We have been able and have proven that we can work successfully with both Act and New Zealand First and we’re open to working with them again obviously post an election, but we want to make the case that the strongest, strongest and most stable form of government will obviously be a very strong party vote for National,” he said.
“The most important thing is we want to maximise the National Party vote.”
Luxon reiterated themes from his state of the nation address in Auckland on Monday, in which he declared an economic turnaround.
He said that on coming into office the “economy was damaged with record high inflation, skyrocketing mortgage payments in stagnated wages”.
“Violent crime was rising, and there were hundreds of ram raids. There was more welfare dependency and kids’ education achievement was plummeting,” he said.
Luxon said the Government had been “plugging away” and “working hard to fix the basics”, which appears to be part of National’s likely campaign slogan.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins says Luxon choosing a November election date indicated “he was desperate to hold on as long as he can” and vowed to present New Zealand with a “a very different Labour Party” once final candidate selections and campaign plans were revealed.
“That’s a late election relative to what we have seen recently. We’ve typically seen New Zealanders going to the polls in October rather than November, that suggests that he is desperate to hold on as long as he can,” Hipkins said.
Since the turn of the century, general elections have generally been held sometime between September and November (the latest being November 27, set by Sir John Key in 2011) except for a rare circumstance in 2002 when then Prime Minister Helen Clark set the election for July 27, months earlier than expected as relations with Labour’s then coalition partner the Alliance broke down.
On his “refreshed” party, Hipkins said, “We are going to have a different slate of candidates. There will be some new faces but there will also be new ideas.”
The party had spent two and a half years as the Opposition “listening to New Zealanders” and now understand “why New Zealanders didn’t vote for us at the last election, we understand they were looking for something different from us”.
“We have refreshed ourselves, we have re-energised ourselves, we’ve changed and we are offering a very different Labour Party at this election to what we were offering last time.”
Act leader David Seymour expected holding the election in November would make it likely any economic recovery more clear to voters ahead of election day.
“It’s only fair that having done the work to cut waste, cut red tape and really fix the economic damage we inherited, that people should be able to see the benefits of that before they vote.”
He dismissed the suggestion the election date was decided with that potential impact in mind, noting it was Luxon’s decision.
On the possibility of coalition negotiations continuing close to Christmas, Seymour said Act would work “efficiently and collegially” during any post-election talks.
Seymour believed it would be acceptable if coalition agreements remained unsigned until after Christmas.
“If that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes, but our intention would be to act in such a way that everything can be wrapped up and people can go to Christmas knowing what sort of government they have.”