Fifteen Predictions for 2026

Frozen Peaches may have been founded in the election year of 2020, but that was too late to lay predictions for that election - and 2023 proved predictable. This time, faced with our most competitive election in a decade, I get to lay down my beliefs as to what might erupt here - and abroad, too - in 2026. 2025 was a damaging year where under half of my predictions came true, so let’s see how many of those I think will come to fruition next year, and what new predictions now make sense to offer up.

1. A party changes leader.

Yes, I’m running this guess back for the third year in a row. That’s how confident I am that I’m finally going to get it right. 

Luxon is in serious danger. However awkward the potential intra-party coalitions to replace him might be, I can’t see National MPs simply sitting by and doing nothing if they’re sleepwalking into a fair chance of losing power, never mind their own jobs. For National’s fortunes to significantly improve, then the economy has to get a lot better - and if it takes off after they’ve already rolled him, it’s not like they’re going to bring him back. Signs of growth must burst forth in that window where National MPs still feel they have a reasonable amount of time to replace Luxon, before a late election in October or November. How long is that window? A handful of months? His time is running out. And whichever major party loses the election, there is no way in hell that they’re happy with the idea of running their leader for the next term. The pressure will be overwhelming on them to bow out and hand over the reins to more likeable colleagues.

Even if the inevitable major party leadership reshuffle doesn’t take place until early 2027, there are still ways for me to win out here. TPM’s leadership have become a huge stumbling block for much of the party, and there will be a lot of pressure on them to go, with high confidence in Maipi-Clarke. In the likely event that the Māori Party fare poorly at this election, will the leadership be able to fend off the calls for them to move on and pass over to whichever safe hands do win Māori seats at the election?

And Marama Davidson has battled cancer; there’s always the chance that renewed health risks unfortunately force her out of politics. 

And Winston Peters is 80. He’ll never retire, but nature retires us all in the end.

2. The British Greens remain neck and neck with Labour, but support for the left bloc of British politics lingers well behind the right bloc.

No British nationwide party on the left has a good pitch. You could fill the Encyclopaedia Britannica with every problem facing Labour within the party, in the government and across the country, so I’ll restrain myself and simply snipe at their incredibly stupid immigration policies. Thirty years for permanent residency?! It’s astonishing how committed Britain has become to national suicide. 

The Lib Dems are a bit foppish and a bit TOPpish - no matter what happens, their centrist draw in soft Tory seats seems to have hit its ceiling. I appreciate the Your Party conference for providing some of the most on-the-nose political comedy I’ve seen in years. They’ll hold onto a dedicated core of ideological purists, who will do everything in their power to hold the party back from becoming a mass movement. 

That leaves the Greens, now the natural home for the millions of dissatisfied left-wing voters, surging in the polls to go toe to toe with Labour…but I listened to the full Rest of Politics interview with Zack Polanski. While he seems like an agreeable, well-spoken guy, it’s like he wasn’t even awake for the past half-decade of British politics. Chlöe Swarbrick was better studied on the numbers and what they mean as a first term MP.

But will that actually hurt him politically? No! This is what genuinely detrimental populist left-wing politics looks like: the kind of commitments which will not work to help people in practice, but which sound good as a message - especially paired with biting attacks on the status quo. Who on the left is going to gravitate back to Labour? Much like with TPM in New Zealand, the greatest risk is not necessarily amongst their own voter base - it’s how the association of Labour with a partner further to the left might endanger them with swing voters.

In a country whose electorate typically behaves in small-c conservative ways, with so much attention in the news on the failings of a centre-left government and the immigration issue, I cannot possibly see a way for the four parties I’ve listed above to consolidate the support of most of the nation between them. Against them, the Conservatives should be able to stabilise even if they’re going nowhere, and Reform can continue to practice their own populist politics with a broader appeal. 

With the left divided and the right mostly united, the Faragists will continue to smash their foes at by elections and build momentum, and we’ll all gnaw at our fingernails, wondering when the new generation will finally get it together. It’s the parties in the devolved nations of the UK who I expect to profit from this vacuum - the SNP have a window to rebuild from some dismal years and recover progressive support, Plaid Cymru are already on the march, and Sinn Fein can just gesture at everything across the Irish Sea. 

3. At least three current or past ministers of the National Party announce their retirement.

We are led by people who have been governing since the early days of Key. In a government that’s getting frustratingly little done, facing the prospect of an electoral battering, a return to Opposition, and no fantastic alternative to come in and rescue the party…yeah, I can think of quite a few names who might be eyeing up the exit doors, not to mention being eyed sourly by younger, better players in their own party. Specifically, I’ll be watching: 

• Andrew Bayly - see my electoral forecast

• Gerry Brownlee, who has had a rambunctious few years at the unceremonious tail end of an exceptionally long career

• Melissa Lee - as with Bayly

• Christopher Luxon, who, if rolled or forced to resign, is likely to succumb to his frustrations and jet off into the corporate world he knows best

• Todd McClay, who must know his career will never peak higher once he shepherds the India FTA through the House - especially in the highly unlikely event that it’s voted down

• Mark Mitchell, if further McSkimming revelations drag him down 

• Shane Reti, who is not trusted by the party to effectively message from atop major ministries  

• Louise Upston, simply because she’s been around since 2008 and still isn’t on track to ascend up the ministerial ladder

4. Opportunity falls under 2% of the vote

We are at the starting line of an intensely partisan, evenly matched drag race of an election. A wasted vote contrasts awfully poorly with a strong sense that voters on the fence can really make a difference this time around. Opportunity will face great difficulty convincing their soft-progressive base that it’s better to hold out hope for change, than to take a side and make a difference in these untenable conditions.

5. The Greens win at least one more electorate than last time.

The Greens are favourites in all of their currently held electorates, and only those electorates. However, there are enough viable targets for them that, given their solid polling and the real potency of leftie youth turnout in the last few years, it wouldn’t surprise me if they look to invest in expanding their power base further instead of just muscling in on Labour’s party vote. As with Opportunity, I discuss this more in my electoral forecast. 

6. Keir Starmer loses the premiership.

Labour will suffer a horrible local election season in May - some polls show them at an absolutely ghastly fourteen percent - and then his party will get the knives out. Nothing about Starmer suggests that he is a man capable of changing his ways. I do not expect him to take ahold of the direction of the government and communicate clearly what he’s going to do different and better. 

Surrounded by viable and ambitious contenders - Angela Rayner and Lucy Powell from the left, Wes Streeting on the Blairite right, Andy Burnham as the Mayor of Manchester getting it done and Shabana Mahmood and Ed Milliband as outside contenders (though I think the candidacies of both are DOA) - pretty much everybody in Labour can think of somebody who can do the job better than its current occupant. Once rolled, Starmer will then presumably be the logical option to kick off to the Justice Ministry in the resultant reshuffle, where he’ll then face a nightmare challenge of implementation whether his premier decision to scrap jury trials goes ahead or not.

7. The Russo-Ukrainian War ends.

The war in Ukraine has just surpassed the length of World War I. Trump’s America will ultimately never trend towards Ukraine over time - he wants a resolution quickly. Now, for all their domestic travails, the major European leaders - Starmer and whoever replaces him, Macron in France and especially now Merz replacing Scholz in Germany - seem genuinely committed to organising in the absence of America to keep supporting Ukraine. It makes sense: even a peacenik like me too often tempted by fellow traveller sentiments has been convinced that Putin may genuinely gamble on attacking the Baltic states after victory in Ukraine, and bank that NATO will break their promises of collective defense to those members. 

But I just don’t think they have the resources to do it on their own, and Zelenskyy’s own actions now look less like diplomatic ploys to sway Trump and more like a genuine interest in clawing a decent peace deal back. Especially because it increasingly looks as though there are only going to be so many years until at least a few of the major Western powers are governed by Putinniks. I don’t believe the AfD has what it takes to get it done in Germany, but the National Rally are favourites for the French presidency in ‘27, Farage for 10 Downing Street in ‘29, and who knows what might happen in Italy (and the States). 

So I believe that Zelenskyy, like Juan Negrín 85 years ago, is no longer fighting out of the conviction that he can win but simply because continued resistance is a useful bargaining chip to water down defeat. I will note, however, that in the unlikely event that the Russian state crumbles from the inside, I don’t think that the Ukrainian army is going to stop marching for some time. They won’t trust Russian promises - they want to leave Russia with the certain knowledge that they cannot try this again - and that means pushing further and faster, until they are finally brought up short by a disinterest from the Western war bloc in supplying them further.

8. A French Prime Minister resigns.

I need to bank some safe points here.

9. A major American political figure will be assassinated

Bleak, but in every single sense America is a boiling cauldron and the government isn’t even trying to cool it down. 

10. The American economy crashes

And I’m cranking up the heat from the year prior. As I anticipated, the government is pursuing disastrous economic policies on trade and immigration, screwing agriculture and manufacturing alike. What I didn’t see coming is how much they’d scare off foreign investment. The government is now covering up basic statistics about inflation and unemployment, and I don’t think they’re doing that because of how great everything is looking. Pair that with the annual risks of a bank collapse and the current danger of the ballooning AI bubble*, and there’s lots of ways this could go wrong and not many for it to break good.

*I believe that, personal distaste aside, AI has a future as a transformative technology, but…what are its actual, economically useful, applications right now to reward the colossal investments that the big players are pouring in? I don’t care about their profits, but if they collapse they take the rest of the economy down with them. Remember the dotcom bubble? It’s not that the internet was a busted flush of a technology - it was just too much money coming in too early and being applied in the wrong ways. That’s what I fear here.

11. Mike Johnson will be ejected as Speaker of the House

Aha! I can call this for the second year in a row, because the Democrats look well on track to pummel the Republicans in the House. I don’t expect them to take the Senate, but I am extraordinarily curious to see what happens in - and I cannot believe I am saying this, and I will never say it again - the state of Maine, which will have so much to say about where American politics is at right now. My money is on the likeliest outcome being Platner* easily winning the primary and then losing the general.

*That guy who kept eagerly signing up to go back overseas to shoot and drink and get SS tattoos even I knew by first sight, and now keeps complaining about how the government misused him. 

12. Mark Carney’s approval rating will be lower at the end than the start of the year

He has clearly impressed a lot of Canadians as a sound, experienced guy. He is still chairing a fatigued and long-running government, which can be hobbled by the same tag that once wounded the Tories - if you’re proposing some new policy. 2$6 didn’t you just do it all those years ago and save us the time? And the Eye of Sauron south of the border is wont to turn elsewhere; Carney can’t play the nationalism card forever.

13. National will win a majority of electorates, including claiming Northland by a margin of over 5000 votes.

I’ve already talked at length about National’s strength on the electorate map despite its weakness in the party vote, which will produce a strange phenomenon where National do not represent a solid majority of the country and may not even control the government, yet in the large majority of New Zealand’s territory, your local MP to raise an issue with will be a Nat.

I wanted to zero in on Northland in particular as the most interesting case of where expectations are set to clash with reality. This electorate has been regarded as a very viable Labour pickup for the past decade, and I expect that this election will dispel that myth once and for all. It’s the presence of other conservative contenders and particularly NZFirst that makes it look close. Willow Jean-Prime has repeatedly shown that, however much she is seen within the Labour Party as a rising star, she is not seen around most of Northland as their best local prospect.

14. Neither major party clears 35% of the vote.

The supreme explanation of the current conditions is offered up at The Overhang. (Seriously, give that a read, it’s so good*. Some pretty pictures too.) I would only add that my amateur pundit’s eye has no faith in either major party to perform well under the harsh lights of the election. 

*This message not sponsored, I have no clue who runs it.

15. Winston Peters creates post-election uncertainty about who he will go with, but sides with National.

A close election means that Winston has a good shot at serving as kingmaker between NACT and Labougreens. Winston, whatever past promises he may have made about not working with Labour, loves to drag things out and make others squeal to demonstrate he’s in power. But I think he’s going to return this government to power. 

Winston alienated his centre-right supporters when he chose Labour over National in 2017. And he hoovered up aggrieved centre-lefties from Labour after 2020 - most of his 2023 vote came from 2020 Labour voters! (Which isn’t surprising, given that most voters were 2020 Labour voters.) Pivoting back into the embrace of a Labour still led by and defined through the last Labour government would poison Winston with both groups. Some of his centre-left supporters would sit the election out, and many of his centre-right supporters would get hoovered up by National ACT. All to enter a government with a confident Opposition who’ve already made their own plans and are ready to battle Winston for credit on policies like the Future Fund.

By sticking with the devil he knows, under a weak Prime Minister - whether that’s Luxon or a shaky new post-coup leader - Winston can extract maximum value as he continues to turn the screws on his colleagues and starve Seymour out. He is right where he wants to be. 

In many ways, this election will be a test of whether Winston’s ravenous self-interest can overcome his pathological need for infighting and betrayal. He threw away a premiership that could have been his in the early 90s because he wanted the freedom to lambast his own government, and he confirmed his fall from Parliament in 2020 by running away from instead of towards the ultra-popular government. 2026 will be his best chance since the 90s to grab the most power he can short of being Prime Minister himself - so long as he doesn’t go too far in convincing the voters that everything this establishment government of Philadelphia lawyers has done is a travesty. (See: Regulatory Standards Bill, India Free Trade Agreement…)

(Also, he’s 80.)

Thank you all for spending another year with me on the journey; your support has helped me to get better and better at this, and I really look forward to seeing the twists and turns of an election year where anything goes and every little thing matters. So look forward to that, and have yourself a Happy New Year!