In my opinion, National MPs need to bite the bullet and ask Chris Luxon to step aside.
I don’t enjoy saying this because personally I like Chris Luxon and have a fair amount of respect for him. But I think the chances are now very high that this is going to happen before the election. He is going to lose the leadership and perhaps the only real choice National MPs now have is how messy they allow this to become.
I’ll explain why I think he loses the leadership — and I think it’s simple maths.
National’s polling is really poor. It’s sub-30 in multiple polls. You can’t write those off as rogue results. The numbers are consistently bad and at that level the party is on track to lose around 11 MPs in November. Those 11 MPs do not want to lose their jobs and within that group are the people now agitating for a change of leadership.
For that agitation to stop, National’s polling would need to lift enough to save at least some of those MPs’ seats.
So how does the polling improve? The economy would have to improve. And is that going to happen between now and November? No, it’s not.
In fact, the economy is more likely to come under further pressure, particularly because of the situation in Iran and rising fuel costs. The most likely scenario is that the economy gets worse, National’s polling deteriorates further, and those 11 MPs — and potentially more — lose their jobs at the election.
Meanwhile, the destabilising campaign we saw in the Herald today continues. Someone is deliberately and repeatedly planting stories in the media. That won’t stop. It will continue to drive the polls down and make Luxon look increasingly like a lame-duck Prime Minister.
So if we assume the economy doesn’t improve, the polling doesn’t improve and the destabilising continues, then the most likely outcome is this: about three months out from the election, in the depths of winter, the National Party loses its nerve and rolls Chris Luxon in a desperate attempt to save the furniture.
I see no realistic alternative to that outcome.
That’s scenario one: hope and pray. And yes, that is technically a strategy — maybe something miraculous happens, the way COVID saved Jacinda Ardern in 2020. But that’s hope-and-prayer stuff.
Scenario two is that they pull the pin. They replace Chris Luxon with someone else and call an early election, allowing that person to seek a mandate while still enjoying a honeymoon period — and before winter and the Iran-related pressures make voters even more miserable than they already are.
If I were in the National caucus, I’d be opting for the second scenario. Because the polling is now so consistently bad that a leadership change is likely to happen anyway before the election. They can’t avoid it — they can only choose when it happens and how messy they let it get.
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