Christopher Luxon's ruling out any possibility of National working with the Opportunity Party after the election is not nearly as emphatic as it sounds.

This time three years ago Luxon was saying his party's strong preference was not to have to work with New Zealand First after the 2023 election, only to end up going into coalition together a couple of months later. In a similar vein, ACT's David Seymour originally specifically ruled out ever sitting around the Cabinet table with New Zealand First Ministers, only to join the post-election coalition because of the perceived greater good of keeping Labour out of office.

Luxon's seemingly unequivocal comments notwithstanding, there is absolutely no doubt National would turn to the Opportunity Party if it needed its numbers to form a government after the election. But there is still a long way to go before that prospect becomes a serious issue.

The Opportunity Party still must get elected to Parliament for a start. Although recent polls show it close to crossing the 5% party vote threshold, it is not there yet. Polls over the next few weeks will show whether the Party's momentum is strengthening on the back of recent publicity, or whether it has peaked and will fall back as there is more scrutiny of its policies and plans. Its most challenging time has yet to come.

It is a high stakes, all or nothing game for the Opportunity Party. If it fails to cross the 5% threshold and does not win an electorate seat (talk about its winning Mount Albert seem fancifully optimistic at this stage) all party votes cast for it will be discarded and therefore essentially wasted.  

This is also the real point behind Luxon's comments this week. Polls show that the biggest chunk – about one quarter – of new supporters for the Opportunity Party are people who voted National at the last election. They may think they are doing National a favour by supporting the Opportunity Party, giving it a potentially more reliable coalition partner than New Zealand First. But they are also voters National desperately needs to entice back into its column. Warning them that their votes will not help the re-election of a National-led government is an important tactic in this regard.

National fears that those voters hold the key to whether the centre-left bloc can get the numbers to form a Labour/Greens/Opportunity coalition that may not therefore need the support of Te Pāti Māori. It also knows that if the Opportunity Party fails to cross the 5% threshold all its votes – including those of previous National supporters – will fall into the electoral waste bin and be ignored.

The former National supporters now favouring the Opportunity Party could add up to 2 percentage points to National's current polling levels, were they to return home. With National polling on average just over 30% in current polls – down from the 39% of the party vote it received at the 2023 election – and the coalition running only marginally of the Opposition bloc in most polls, an uplift of up to 2% in National's fortunes could have a significant impact on the election outcome.

Moreover, if National can reclaim the bulk of those former supporters and the Opportunity Party falls below the 5% threshold, the support it has attracted from former Labour and Green Party supporters will fall into the same electoral waste bin, to the detriment of those parties’ election chances. That is why attempting to engineer this type of electoral outcome was the real reason behind Luxon's comments this week.

But this highlights an important aspect of MMP – that politicians and political parties do not have the control over the system they had previously. Everything they now say or do is constrained by the parties they are working with or seek to work with in government. There are no political absolutes anymore. So, when the Prime Minister said this week that the most important decision at the coming election was which party could manage the economy best, it was a far less absolute statement than when previous Prime Ministers have made similar statements in the days of the First-Past-the-Post system. 

Appearing to rule out working with the Opportunity Party is in a similar vein. It sounds emphatic and clear but is really at best conditional. If the coalition's options after the election are forming an albeit cumbersome governing arrangement with the Opportunity Party or going into Opposition, the outcome will be a no-brainer.

And Luxon's current coalition partners will expect to have just as much say as him in making that decision.