While Te Pāti Māori and the Greens are seen as Labour’s only available coalition partners, Chris Trotter says it has no winning moves

By Chris Trotter*

Chess is war on 64 squares. War is politics by other means. Unsurprising, then, that the moves of chess players and the moves of politicians have much in common.

Above all other objectives the political strategist seeks to position adversaries where they can do the least harm. Enemies only become dangerous when they are moving. When they have nowhere to go they cease to be a threat.

In the months leading up to the general election the party with the most to lose by being bottled-up is Labour. Chris Hipkins and his colleagues cannot remain dependent on the support of the Greens and Te Pāti Māori – not if they want to win. They need to move.

The key questions of the election therefore become: Can Labour reposition itself? And, if it can, then where should Labour reposition itself?

Perhaps the most obvious way Labour for Labour to reposition itself would be to rule out both the Greens and Te Pāti Māori as coalition partners.

To a limited extent Labour has already done this in relation to Te Pāti Māori. Understandably, the meltdown of that party towards the end of 2024 and the subsequent revelations concerning its internal organisation and management made it easy for Hipkins to declare “Te Pāti Māori are not currently showing New Zealanders they are fit to be part of the next government”. In the absence of significant changes to both its policy and leadership, Hipkins should hold to that. Any other course makes absolutely no strategic sense.

But if distancing Labour decisively from Te Pāti Māori is a no-brainer, ruling out the Greens is a much more difficult proposition to sell to centre-left voters.

Certainly, smiling sweetly at the Greens was much easier to do when it was headed-up by the likes of Jeanette Fitzsimons, Rod Donald, Russel Norman and James Shaw.

Back then the Greens were a much more obviously environmentally-driven political movement. The party’s focus in the late-1990s and early 2000s was on the “threat” of genetic engineering, shifting in the 2010s to the befouling of New Zealand’s waterways by the burgeoning dairy industry; and then, inevitably, to the slow-motion catastrophe that is global warming.

While these were the Greens priorities Labour was quite content to let them bear the burden of shifting Overton’s window leftwards. Having prepared the ground for serious reform, however, the Greens were then expected to step back and allow Labour to claim the lion’s share of political reward.

The trick, from Labour’s perspective, was to keep the Greens a percentage-point or two north of the 5 percent MMP threshold. Just enough to ensure that Labours seat tally was bolstered by enough Green MPs to secure the treasury benches.

This arrangement made a 40 percent-plus Party Vote a realistic Labour goal. What’s more, the vast numerical discrepancy between Labour and Green MPs contributed hugely to ensuring a quiescent coalition partner. The tiny tail attached to Labour’s big dog could waggle away furiously. The voters just smiled indulgently.

What Labour cannot afford is a stroppy Green Party with pretensions to becoming its equal. A Green Party Vote above 10 percent more-or-less guarantees a maximum Labour Party Vote in the mid-to-high 30s. That figure makes victory considerably less likely without entertaining the prospect of a ménage à trois – a proposition fraught with as much risk in parliament as it is in bed!

Complicating matters considerably following the 2017 general election has been the Greens ideological radicalisation. From the recognisably environmental party of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the Greens have morphed into an unashamedly revolutionary entity driven by an indigestible mixture of tikanga, identity politics, anti-capitalism, and solidarity with Palestine and the Global South. Among the flag-waving, keffiyeh-wearing Greens of the 2020s, global warming is beginning to look like yesterday’s news.

This is not an ideological landscape in which the overwhelming majority of New Zealand voters feel comfortable – and that fact is now being registered in the polls. In 2023 the Greens won 11.6 percent of the Party Vote – their largest share ever. In the January 2026 Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll, however, the party is supported by just 7.7 percent of voters. Shave another 1 percentage point of Green support and it will be exactly where Labour wants it – or used to want it.

Labour’s problem in 2026 is that a large chunk of its own caucus are ideological soulmates of the Greens. This problem is viciously (and entertainingly) laid bare in the latest Substack post by right-wing political commentator Ani O’Brien.

This is how she describes Georgie Dansey, retiring Deputy-Speaker Adrian Rurawhe’s replacement from Labour’s list:

“Dansey is classic of the new brand of Labour. She is young, has all the ‘right’ luxury beliefs, is in the process of discovering her Māori whakapapa, and calls herself ‘queer’.”

Labour cannot begin the war of political movement it must wage if it is to win, without first cutting its ties with the ultra-radical parties to its left. But it cannot do that without simultaneously purging itself of the same “wokesterism” that is currently rendering both Te Pāti Māori and the Greens electorally toxic.

Freed of its own woke encumbrances, and having cut-loose the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, Labour would be free, at least on paper, to campaign on the left-populist manifesto it is already in the process of convincing the electorate it has to hand.

If Lenin won the Russian masses with the inspired three-word slogan: “Peace. Bread. Land”, then why not send Chippie forth to win over working-class New Zealanders with the promise of “Jobs. Health, Homes”? Backed up by Labour’s reassuring slogan-under-testing “Better is possible”?

Except, of course, that Labour cannot possibly hope to succeed by campaigning as if they’re Zohran Mamdani while offering New Zealanders economic policies to the right of Keir Starmer. Barbara Edmonds makes an entirely unconvincing Yanis Varoufakis. (Craig Renny, on the other hand, is an ideological dead-ringer for the former Greek finance minister!)

Labour has squandered the two years between their crushing 2023 defeat and the commencement of the 2026 election campaign. A believable left-populist policy platform requires more than Mamdani-inspired election posters, and Labour could have had one if it had somewhere found the courage to do more that sit very still and hope to win the election by default.

As matters now stand, however, Labour cannot begin a war of movement because it cannot take the steps needed to make such a war possible. It cannot shed the Greens without igniting a caucus revolt, and it will not throw away the potential “overhang” of seats with which Te Pāti Māori could clinch a razor-thin majority for the Left.

It might have been able to do these things if it had spent two years turning itself into the party that takes climate change seriously; the party for positive Māori-Pakeha relations; the party of liberty and reason; as well as the party committed to delivering jobs, homes, and health.

Too late now. In the chess game that has already begun Labour’s opponents’ pieces are already hemming it in. National and NZ First have both rejected any kind of relationship with the Labour Party. There is no prospect now of a repeat of the Labour-Green-NZ First coalition of 2017-20; no chance of a grand centrist coalition of National and Labour to exclude the extremist parties of left and right from government.

But, while Labour’s only available coalition partners are Te Pāti Māori and the Greens it simply cannot win. The ideological unacceptability of those parties has placed Labour in “check”, and with National’s, NZ First’s and Act’s pieces positioned where they are Labour cannot take itself out of check.

In chess, that is called “checkmate”. In electoral politics, it’s called “another three years in opposition”.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.