'I'm going nowhere but up': Winston Peters on populism, politics and the polls

“When you talk about populism, let me ask you this question,” says Winston Peters, the MP who has at times been in a position to handpick who will lead New Zealand. “In your profession or mine: who wants to be unpopular?”

The eccentric veteran politician – rich-voiced and finely-tailored – has held seats in New Zealand’s parliament since 1979 with only two breaks from his time in office, advancing his minor party on a platform of curbing immigration, benefits for pensioners, and exhortations to “common sense”.

Average politicians “haven’t got any charisma, any magic about them”, says Peters, speaking to the Guardian in his spacious Wellington office. “They can walk down the street, walk into a restaurant and nobody knows who they are.”

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This is not a problem for Peters, 75, who is New Zealand First, the party he founded. He is notoriously pugnacious, and has held news conferences that are part of New Zealand political folklore – but opportunities for a free-ranging, sit-down interview with him are rare.

But after 2017’s election he changed the course of the nation’s political history when – holding the balance of power with 9% of the vote when neither of the two main parties won enough to govern outright – he selected Jacinda Ardern to be prime minister of New Zealand despite her centre-left Labour party holding fewer seats.

Decrying the failures of neoliberalism, he consigned centre-right National – the party from which he had originally hailed – to the political wilderness following nine years in power. The move also won him the roles of deputy prime minister and foreign minister.

After three years of steering the country through crisis after crisis, Ardern is polling at heights that would allow her to govern alone. She is one of New Zealand’s most popular prime ministers ever. That puts New Zealand First – languishing at about 2% in the polls – and Peters himself at serious risk of falling out of politics altogether. In New Zealand, parties require 5% of the vote, or victory in one constituency seat, to enter Parliament.

But analysts have written off Peters before. He is a consummate survivor. And there are other forces at play ahead of September’s vote: Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore, the so-called “bad boys of Brexit”, and two of the chief architects of the Leave.EU campaign, have in recent months become trenchant admirers of Peters, and voiced plans to sow “mayhem” in the country’s vote.

The pair told the media outlet Newshub this month that they held a contract to deliver “Winston on steroids” to New Zealand’s public.

Neither party has said whether money has changed hands for the work (the pair told Newshub that they were not paying Peters). The men, Peters says, are helping him out “with some ideas”.

‘Populism means that you’re talking to the ordinary people’

Sober and serious when it comes to matters of his beloved foreign affairs portfolio, Peters will not be drawn to comment on Trump’s leadership. But he disagrees that New Zealand has so far avoided the surges of populism seen in the United States and Britain.

Peters, who describes himself as part-Māori, has been vehemently opposed to political measures meant to bolster outcomes for New Zealand’s Indigenous people. He despises, he says, the “tokenistic, paternalistic brigade of politics who think equality is what they can give you, who say in their reverse racism, ‘I’ve got a pigeonhole for you and it’s there,’ but it’s never at the top.’”

It’s time for “the end of that nonsense that somehow populism is a suspicious category of person,” he says. “Populism means that you’re talking to the ordinary people and you’re placing their views far higher than the Beltway and the paparazzi or dare I say the bureaucracy.”

Those who reject him as a populist are “intellectually narrow”, Peters says.

Neither the 2019 Christchurch mosque terrorist attacks, in which 51 Muslims were killed by a self-proclaimed white supremacist, nor the resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests this year, have changed his long-held views on immigration and race.

Banks and Wigmore have deemed social media a particular battleground for Peters; they claim it will be instrumental to increasing his share of the vote from 2% to their goal of 12% – an idea Peters appears to relish.

“It’s constant, it’s dirt, it’s filth, it’s defamatory,” he says, referring to his detractors on the platforms. “And I’ve got some bad news for them – I’m not going nowhere but up in this campaign.”

Peters has two modes: irascible and pugnacious, or full of mirth. He has a tendency to start chuckling halfway through his own sentence, as though just listening to himself makes him laugh.

He rejects the idea that he does not enjoy giving interviews.

“I don’t know where you got that idea from,” says Peters, a sentence most reporters in New Zealand will have heard from him at least once. Yet his press secretary had referred to him as “shy and private” and Peters said he had been “persuaded” to agree to this conversation.

Peters “pities” political peers who sit down for profiles with reporters. They lack “dignity”.

“Every other politician has been in the women’s magazines, laying themselves out,” he says. “‘My lovely family’ and all this. ‘My catastrophic life and how I survived.’”

Peters prefers keeping keeping his private life private. When he has time, he escapes to his home in Northland to fish, where “you’re on the ocean and there’s no barrier between you and any part of the whole world”.

For someone so self-assured, he is not entirely free from anxiety. He admits to expecting the worst when things are going well and says he writes down his problems when he can’t sleep.

“Otherwise you’ll become the victim of the wild horse of worry,” he adds.

One of Peters’s constant claims is that he has been misunderstood and sidelined by the media. Surely this is untrue: he is the deputy prime minister and part of the government; he holds a news conference and reporters rush to attend, never certain of what he will say next.

“It is our sort of lot to be constantly berated by the media. Why? Because we don’t fit their narrative,” Peters says. “They’re either left or right. Ownership is on the right, the working force of the media is on the left.”

That leaves him, he says, “an elongated pest which should be removed from the scene”.

He has derided neoliberalism for decades and is equally scathing about “woke” culture.

What’s in the middle? “New Zealand First!” says Peters.

Kingmaker once more?

In the centre of his stately and fairly impersonal office in Wellington is a large whiteboard, empty but for a single newspaper page.

The article is a recent one from the New Zealand Herald, which Peters gestures to with pride. Titled a “report card” on Peters’ time in government, the writer assesses that New Zealand First has achieved or partially achieved 80% of the almost 70 promises it had extracted from Ardern’s party in order to support her as prime minister.

He cites $3bn earmarked for provincial New Zealand, more frontline police officers, more foreign affairs spending, and free medical checks for younger and older New Zealanders as hallmarks of his party’s involvement.

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But policy is not necessarily why people vote for New Zealand First, and the “policy” tab of the party’s website does not list any for the upcoming election.

It might not matter. Peters is the third in a triumvirate of New Zealand politicians – all of whom are the current leaders of their parties – who are known among the general public by their first names.

Say “Jacinda” (Ardern) or “Judith” (Collins, the leader of National), and everyone knows who you mean, but long before they arrived on the scene, Peters was already just “Winston”.

This election could be the one to decide – although pundits say this every ballot – whether New Zealanders still find Peters’s rhetoric essential or an anachronism. In a poll this week, 59% said they did not trust him.

Peters must also prove that Ardern still needs him; when asked for his assessment, Peters says the prime minister had “no experience in government” when he thrust her into the leadership, and he had lent his, to “support some great ideas and stop some bad ones”.

Collins, Ardern’s centre-right rival – who only assumed the party leadership this month – has “serious skill base, serious experience base,” Peters says. “But her problem is the team she’s got around her.”

At his current polling, does he honestly believe he’ll be fielding election night phone calls from the two leaders, in the Kingmaker position once more?

“Queens,” he corrects, noting that the two major party leaders are women. “I know you all think it’s arrogant, but I’ve proven it all my career … we don’t stand around for you people to determine the next election.”

Besides, when he walks down the street, he says, he knows how people feel about him.

“They shout out ‘legend,’” Peters says. “All sorts of stuff. Young people. A 14-year-old kid. ‘Hey, Winnie! You’re a legend!’”

He can’t stop laughing.