Christopher Luxon will head into a caucus meeting this week with a new 1News poll bearing down on him as speculation over the PM's future reaches fever pitch.
The results of the 1News Verian poll, carried out amid the fuel crisis and after the Prime Minister's Cabinet reshuffle, will be released at 6pm tonight.
It will come after often-rumoured leadership candidate Chris Bishop appears on TVNZ's Q+A this morning, an interview slot Luxon has repeatedly declined to do in the past year.
Parliament returns for a two-week sitting block tomorrow before recessing again ahead of Budget 2026, a window which multiple commentators have identified as the moment National's leadership question needed to be dealt with ahead of November's election.
Recent polling has consistently shown National hovering around or below 30%, with the party yet to arrest a slide that has persisted for months.
Christopher Luxon's senior colleagues stood behind him as he faced speculation that a horror poll result could spell the end for his time as Prime Minister. (Source: 1News)
Tonight's poll will reveal whether that trend has deepened further.
Luxon's personal standing in approval and preferred prime minister ratings have also come under scrutiny, with the PM tracking below Labour's leader in several recent polls.
Leadership speculation reaches fever pitch
It lands days after reports MPs were moving to replace Luxon as National leader could happen within the next fortnight, and TVNZ's Breakfast's Tova O'Brien revealed a National MP had told her the numbers were "probably there" to unseat him.
The MP said the preference was for Luxon to stand down rather than be rolled.
"Nobody wants blood to spill. Anything other than him stepping down would be a nightmare and he knows that," the MP said in a text to 1News.
The Prime Minister says he is "very confident" that he has the "full support" of the National Party caucus. (Source: 1News)
Luxon moved to shut down the talk at a media conference in Pōkeno on Friday, telling reporters he was "confident I have the numbers" and claimed that if an election were held today, the coalition government would be re-elected.
He said last week that public polling he had seen supported that.
"There is more work for the National Party to do," he said.
"The way we do that is we demonstrate that we can get this economy growing again for New Zealanders, so we can lower the cost of living for them."
Whip concerns
The Herald reported National's Party whip Stuart Smith could not contact Luxon during Parliament's last sitting a fortnight ago to relay the concerns of backbench MPs.
A spokesperson for the PM said Luxon had a "busy diary" but was "always available to MPs", and had spent the day with Smith on Tuesday.
Liam Hehir said there was a group of disgruntled MPs, but they were not Ministers and there was no single leader behind the potential move. (Source: Breakfast)
On Friday, Luxon bluntly rejected the report: "That's just wrong. I was with Stuart Smith all of Tuesday in North Canterbury, travelling with him in his electorate all day."
Political commentator Liam Hehir, who was formerly active in the National Party, told Breakfast he was aware of "a group of disgruntled MPs" pushing for change, but said none of them were ministers.
"Of all the names that were mentioned to me, they were all sort of people whose careers had stalled, they'd kind of been a bit disgraced, and haven't become ministers," Hehir said. He added there was "no sort of leader" behind the push.
Ministers rallied behind Luxon on Friday. Finance Minister Nicola Willis told RNZ from the US she was "100%" behind him and that her support had "never wavered".
Bishop, who faced a partial demotion in Luxon's Cabinet reshuffle earlier this month and has previously been rumoured as a potential challenger, told Newstalk ZB there was "no coup happening".
The ongoing speculation about the PM's leadership of National has persisted through the summer and has now likely become a defining theme of his current term.
Few other sitting prime ministers have faced such persistent and sustained public speculation about their leadership without it crystallising into a formal challenge.
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