Winston Peters at 80: the populist’s populist clocks up 50 years of political comebacks

Wellington Airport

Winston Peters turns a venerable 80 on April 11, but he showed no sign of retiring as New Zealand’s archetypal populist during his recent state of the nation speech. He especially enjoyed the hecklers, gleefully telling them one by one to get out.

As ever, his detractors became extras in the Winston Peters show – something of a trademark in his long political career. As well as a milestone birthday, 2025 will mark 50 years since Peters’ first election campaign in 1975.

In that first attempt, he ran unsuccessfully as the National Party candidate for the Northern Maori seat. In 1978, he won in Hunua, but only after a judicial recount. Already we can see a pattern: a dogged determination to come back and a lawyer’s litigious streak.

His political instincts were formed in that era between 1975 and 1984 under prime minister Robert Muldoon, National’s original, pugnacious populist. It implanted pride in his nation, economic protectionism, and a belief in old-fashioned “common sense” politics.

Those characteristics could also be his undoing. In 1991, Peters was sacked from Jim Bolger’s National cabinet for publicly criticising cabinet colleagues. He was later kicked out of the National caucus entirely and then vacated his seat.

As his party website explains in retrospect, he’d questioned “the neoliberal policy agenda” and paid the price. He formed NZ First in 1993 and won back the seat of Tauranga. Ever since, the party known mockingly as “Winston First” has been inextricably identified with its (thus far) one and only leader.

Coalitions of the willing

Any mention of Winston Peters’ name gets a reaction, be it love, loathing or wry admiration. For the political scientist, though, his career is remarkable for its many ups and downs, and for sheer longevity.

In New Zealand’s first proportional representation election in 1996, NZ First, still only three years old, won all of the (then five) Maori electorates. With 13.4% of the party vote (its best result ever), NZ First gained 17 seats, handing Peters a kingmaker role in the government formation negotiations.

The upshot was a National-NZ First coalition, which broke up acrimoniously in 1998 after a disagreement about a proposal to sell Wellington Airport brought existing tensions between the parties to a head.

At the 1999 election, NZ First lost the five Maori seats and its party vote plummeted to 4.3%. It got back into parliament only thanks to Peters holding Tauranga by a fingernail: a mere 63 vote majority.

Dumped by Maori voters, he turned his attention to New Zealand’s growing retirement generations and climbed on board the anti-immigration bandwagon. In 2003, Peters launched an attack on “Third World immigrants” that rattled the National Party’s cage so hard it felt compelled to launch its own populist campaign.

Then National leader Don Brash’s infamous speech at Orewa in 2004 centred around an alleged “dangerous drift towards racial separatism”. The country became polarised around Maori aspirations and the Treaty of Waitangi, not dissimilar to the effect today of the Treaty Principles Bill.

Being a populist, Peters is sometimes mischaracterised as far right. But the more significant aspect of his career has been his centrist aptitude for collaborating with either National or Labour, depending on the political wind.

Between 2005 and 2008, Peters supported Helen Clark’s Labour-led government, enjoying the plum job of foreign minister. But in 2008, National’s John Key categorically refused to work with Peters in government, and NZ First fell to 4.1% at the election.

With no local electorate win this time, Peters was banished to the political wilderness. Many thought (or hoped) this would spell the end of his career. But he was back in 2011, aiming to be in opposition against Key’s National government. He succeeded in this – and confounded his critics – with a party vote of 6.6%.

COVID and comebacks

The strategy of seeing out the Key (and successor Bill English) years on the cross benches worked well, with the 2014 election delivering a party-vote boost to 8.7%.

Peters’ next big break came after the 2017 election when he once again played kingmaker. Although National won the most seats, Peters chose a coalition with Jacinda Ardern’s Labour, with support from the Greens.

But NZ First’s voter-base had been evenly split over supporting a National-led or Labour-led government. Inevitably, the party would be punished for choosing to go with either major party. And indeed, its share dropped from 7.2% in 2017 to 2.6% in the 2020 election – its worst result ever.

Once again, Peters was cast out into the wilderness, to the undoubted delight of his many detractors. It was over, surely? As the 2023 election approached, there was considerable doubt about Peters making yet another comeback.

His party was polling better than in 2011, however, and in the end romped home with 6.1% of the vote. Peters used his bargaining power to become foreign minister and deputy prime minister in the current National-led coalition.

Some may have wondered how the wily old fox found his way back into the coop. But we can trace at least some of the reason back to a stroll Peters took through the COVID protest camp in parliament grounds in February 2022.

He said he was there to listen, whereas the Ardern government’s refusal to talk with protestors was “just going to make things much worse”. To make his day, parliament’s speaker Trevor Mallard had Peters trespassed from parliament, which only boosted his maverick reputation – and helped pave the way back to power.

Not his first rodeo

Peters courted an anti-vax, anti-globalist constituency, promising to “defend freedom” by ending vaccine mandates and holding “a credible fully independent inquiry into New Zealand’s COVID-19 response”.

Both things were going to happen anyway. But Peters won votes that might otherwise have gone to fringe protest parties, none of which got more than 1.2%.

Like a Pied Piper in a double-breasted pinstripe suit, he led the disgruntled all the way to the ballot box. One campaign video featured him in cow-cocky gear, mounting a horse and boasting “this is not our first rodeo”. Among the current generation of politicians, only he could have pulled that off.

Peters possesses a canny political instinct that combines opportunism with attention-grabbing rhetoric. He can drum up enough enthusiasm from target audiences to get his party over (or back over) the 5% MMP threshold.

His recent declaration of a “war on woke” shows he’s doing it again. He zeros in on a political pain-point to energise a support base and simultaneously enrage opponents. The latter – along with “the mainstream media” – are used as props as he campaigns from one provincial community hall to the next.

At 80, Peters is as well adapted to posting on Elon Musk’s X as he is to old-school hustings politics. And he’s showing no sign of calling it a day as he prepares to hand over the office of deputy prime minister to ACT’s David Seymour later this year.

As the 2026 election draws nearer, one thing will be certain – you can’t rule him out. Don’t be surprised if one day we see an AI-generated Winston Peters telling us this is neither his first nor his last rodeo.

Grant Duncan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.