Why Winston Peters has turned into the Farage of NZ

Nigel Farage Winston Peters split art 4x3

In politics, most people are other people. Mirroring others is commonplace, and a single version of a politician – their policies, positions and patter – is impossible in find.

Winston Peters would most likely beg to differ. Arguably New Zealand’s most prominent public figure, the country’s Foreign Minister believes he is cut from original cloth. Yet his likeness to a certain foreign politician, in style and substance, is becoming hard to ignore: veteran hard-right British politician Nigel Farage.

In NZ’s fragmented political landscape, Peters’s recent populist right-wing exploits could realign his country’s conservative politics in a fashion similar to the effect Farage and his nationalist Reform party are currently having in the UK.

Under his leadership, Farage has manoeuvred the party he founded in 2018 to a position where it now threatens to displace the Conservative Party as Britain’s main voice on the political right. Though the next UK general election is not scheduled for another four years, some opinion polls have underscored Reform’s ascendancy by showing it besting not just the Tories but also the incumbent centre-left UK Labour Party.

The 80-year-old Peters – another foundational leader of a self-described nationalist party, NZ First – has long prided himself as being his own person. Recently, however, his style appears to mimic that of Farage’s.

In an address recently to NZ First’s annual conference, Peters fanned the same flames of disaffection that have helped propel Farage to new heights. This included rallying his supporters against the direction of the nation, cultural change, shifting society norms and traditional parties – where Peters blasted the main opposition centre-left NZ Labour Party, while obliquely poking his coalition partner and National Party Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon.

Like Farage, Peters similarly aims to tap voters who have lost confidence in the major parties to deal with some vital common issues. These include immigration strategy, protecting so-called traditional values and upholding national sovereignty.

In his speech – strewn with gripe politics – Peters sought to rouse patriotism and attitudes that fit firmly into Farage’s playbook. To encourage the point, Peters gave heavy emphasis to the restoration of “values”. He linked this to immigration and revived a 2018 campaign policy of requiring all migrants to sign a document agreeing to abide by New Zealand values, a measure that will go further than the current simple swearing of a citizenship oath.

Farage and other popular nationalists cast globalism as a modern pathogen, with unbridled immigration as its most virulent strain. Peters is no different.

“New Zealand First is a nationalist party, while other parties are self-confessed globalists. Kiwis are becoming increasingly worried about immigration issues,” Peters said in his conference speech.

“People around the world are fearful as to where their countries are going – just look at the United States of America, the UK, Ireland, Germany, and recently in Australia – and New Zealanders are no different. They are more acutely aware of the problem we’re dealing with here than the politicians are.”

There is logic behind Peters modelling himself on Farage; popularism dressed up as nationalism is on the rise and it is shifting, even convulsing, democracies worldwide. The streets of inner London were crowded last week with largely hostile Britons who subscribe to a similar nationalistic zeal as the Reform leader.

Not only does Peters’s argument have the intention of reframing NZ immigration strategy, it also encourages the same cri de coeur that shapes Farage’s political cause: “I want my country back.”

And similar to Farage’s approach to political storytelling, Peters speaks to his people as though they have a personal stake in the changes he prescribes.

Further whetting the right-wing whistle at his conference, Peters spoke critically of diversity and wokeism, pledging to remove Treaty of Waitangi references from government communications and avoid co-governance measures with the indigenous Maori. To strengthen his credentials with the hard right, he invited Northern Territory senator Jacinta Price to address the conference, in which she derided race-based policies.

On a personal level, Peters and Farage are on friendly terms and seem to enjoy each other’s company. Peters visited London last November as Foreign Minister, and the two reportedly talked about UK political developments and Donald Trump – whom Farage roundly supports and whom he likened to Peters during a 2018 interview with a New Zealand journalist.

Beyond Reform’s polling prowess, Peters craves Farage’s perceived grip on the national conversation and, by doubling down on populist ideas and nationalistic rhetoric, he appears to believe this is a politically justifiable strategy.

In a sense, this is already happening. No other NZ politician sets the temperature like Peters, and it is commonly acknowledged that few things get done in government without his nod.

Parallels with Farage continue in a wider sense. Since the advent of proportional representation voting in the mid-1990s, the ensuing fragmentation of New Zealand politics has lowered the electoral threshold. This has enabled Peters and NZ First to thrive in much the same way Reform is now doing as voters appear to lose faith in the Conservatives and Labour.

Peters believes the typical NZ First voter is the median New Zealander. This could be a telling indicator that he is convinced the average voter will be drawn to his brand of politics. If true, this could prompt a realignment of the political right that could place Peters and his party at its vanguard, upsetting the traditional leadership of the governing National Party and diluting the influence of Peters’s other coalition partner, the libertarian ACT party led by Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour.

Peters’s confidence – which rarely ebbs – may be further maintained by recent polling in New Zealand indicating that not only is NZ First increasing in popularity, albeit in small increments, but support for Peters as preferred prime minister has risen the most out of the main contenders.

He now sits not that far behind Luxon and Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins, and in an RNZ-Reid Research poll last week that showed a tight race between Labour and National, NZ First was once again predicted to hold the balance of power to form a majority on either the left or right at next year’s general election. Peters has been here before and although he has previously ruled out working with Labour under Hipkins, Hipkins has suggested he would consider a partnership with the maverick MP.

If nothing else, Peters is a political survivor with a strong pragmatic side. He has served administrations on both the left and right and, with an ever-changing political stance, he’s no unyielding devotee who will hold the line no matter the cost, as Farage is.

This is where the two leaders decouple.