National gives just one Indian-origin candidate a real list shot. And only just
Prime minister Christopher Luxon and National candidate from Tamaki Mahesh Muralidhar.
Mahesh Muralidhar’s ranking gives him a genuine shot at becoming a list MP. But it's nowhere close to safe.
Analysis: The National Party has put clear distance between Mahesh Muralidhar and its other Indian-origin candidates in its election-year party list announced on Saturday.
Muralidhar, its candidate from Tāmaki in Auckland, has been ranked 24 on the party list released on August 8, a sharp rise from 43 in 2023.
The next Indian-origin candidate does not appear until Ankit Bansal at 53. Lalit Arya is ranked 59, Sunil Kumar 63, Karuna Muthu 64 and Ghouse Majeed 66. List-only candidates Robin Atwall and Ash Nayyar are ranked 70 and 71.
That leaves Muralidhar as the only Indian-origin candidate to whom National has offered anything approaching a realistic second route to Parliament if he fails to win his electorate. But even that route looks tight.
In its official announcement, the National Party singled out Muralidhar and three others as highly-ranked new candidates.
But his No 24 ranking needs some decoding. It does not mean National needs to win only 24 seats for him to become an MP.
Many National candidates ranked below Muralidhar on the list are contesting electorate seats the party is very likely to win. An Awaaz analysis found 18 such candidates in National strongholds.
If they win their electorates, they become MPs regardless of how low they sit on National’s list. There are also 23 candidates ranked ahead of Muralidhar in the list. If all 18 lower-ranked stronghold candidates won, those 23 candidates plus the 18 electorate winners would account for 41 National MPs before Muralidhar.
That would make him roughly National’s (if at all) 42nd MP.
And that is where the party’s polling becomes important. National would likely need to be somewhere around the mid-30s in the party vote for 42 seats to be comfortably within reach.
But no major national poll since March has put National at 34 per cent or higher. Across the major published polls this year, National has mostly been sitting around the high-20s to low-30s.
That is why Muralidhar’s No 24 ranking gives him a genuine shot at becoming a list MP, but does not make him safe.
For this analysis, we classified a seat as a National stronghold if the party won it in at least four of the six general elections from 2008 to 2023, including the 2023 election. Where electorate names or boundaries changed, the closest clear predecessor was used.
The longer horizon matters because 2023 was a particularly strong election for National. The party won 38.08 per cent of the party vote and 43 electorates, giving it 48 MPs overall. Crucially, only five came from the party list even then.
Muralidhar, of course, has another route. Win the Tāmaki electorate. The seat has a long history as a National seat, and the National Party comfortably won the party vote there in 2023.
Muralidhar's rise from 43 to 24 in a single election cycle represents a substantial show of confidence from National. No other Indian-origin candidate comes close to him on the list.
But even National’s highest-ranked Indian-origin candidate has been placed around the parliamentary margin rather than securely inside it.
