Will New Zealand’s liberal regime survive the post-liberal era?
Reuben Steff is associate professor at Mendel University in the Czech Republic. He is author of New Zealand’s Geopolitics and the US-China Competition.
OPINION: New Zealand’s liberal democratic regime is weakening.
By “liberal regime”, I mean more than elections. It encompasses the governing order: Parliament, parties, ministries, courts, universities, media, NGOs, corporations, policy elites, and the norms around free speech and institutional independence.
The question is not whether this system should be abandoned, but whether New Zealanders believe the system is adaptable, effective and legitimate.
That is the challenge of the post-liberal era.
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Post-liberalism is not a singular movement, but a multi-dimensional reaction to connected failures – real and perceived – across the West.
The postwar Western order rested on “embedded liberalism”: a compromise between open markets and national industry and workers, where states supported trade while retaining room for welfare and social cohesion.
From the 1970s and 1980s, that settlement gave way to a hyper-liberal order. Capital and labour moved freely. Borders opened. National industries weakened and institutions globalised.
Then came ideological overreach. The end-of-history mood assumed globalisation and liberal democracy were permanent. Politics therefore became managerial and stagnant as elites treated efficiency and mobility as more important than solidarity.
In time “progressive” politics made identity, not citizenship or national interest, the central language of public life. Inclusion was promised but social atomisation followed as hyper-liberalism weakened the communal bonds embodied most broadly in the idea of the nation.
In parallel, trust in experts and elites decreased. The failure to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy exploded the myth of liberal universality. The 2008 financial crisis showed those who benefited the most from globalisation would socialise losses as they shifted the bill on to ordinary citizens. Many, also, are angry about governance during the Covid era.
A counter-elite seized the opening. In the US especially, it now sits close to power: intellectuals hostile to hyper-liberalism, tech figures angry at progressive institutional capture, and political actors who know many voters no longer believe the system works.
But as part of the US information ecosystem and imperium, New Zealand is downstream of these ideas and forces.
The post-liberal critique resonates because liberal institutions have sometimes governed poorly and arrogantly, and people look around and see decline.
Thus, liberal democratic regimes are embattled globally, with V-DEM’s 2026 report estimating that democracy for the average global citizen has fallen back to 1978 levels.
Only 7% of the world’s population now lives in liberal democracies.
These figures should unsettle New Zealanders because politicians often treat the existing system as an inheritance rather than an achievement. It isn’t. Liberal democracy is historically unusual. It had to be created and institutionalised.
It had to win world wars and the first Cold War.
Democracy is based in our belief that it works best. Citizens need evidence that houses can be built, hospitals treat people in reasonable time, schools teach effectively, crime is contained, energy is affordable, and young families can see a future.
The trouble begins when democratic governments stop delivering enough freedom, order and competence to justify their claims.
The warning signs are visible. The Helen Clark Foundation’s latest report found that only 40% of New Zealanders trust the government to do the right thing, and the country has separated into groups: the connected (30%), the ambivalent (41%) and the alienated (28%).
Financial stress predicts low belonging, low trust, high isolation and negative attitudes to immigration more than almost any other variable.
As more become functionally poorer - the direction of travel of New Zealanders for years now - then so too will the percentage of the ambivalent and alienated rise.
Meanwhile, AUT’s 2026 Trust in News report found that only 37% of New Zealanders trusted news in general. This matters because liberal democracy requires a shared reality: what happened, what evidence shows, what words mean and what trade-offs exist.
That common basis is dissolving, and the digital environment is saturated with outrage, synthetic media and algorithmic distortion. Deepfakes, cloned voices and AI videos now circulate alongside news and political argument. The first question people ask is no longer “Did you see this?” but “Is that real?”.
The danger is that many will stop believing anything outside their own echo chamber resulting in democratic persuasion giving way to factional warfare. Extremes on left and right already exploit this through moral absolutism and punishment of anything that goes against their self-serving closed ideological orthodoxy.
Some elites will say, “just trust experts and disregard misinformation”. But a liberal regime cannot fact-check its way out of material failure.
Meanwhile, the post-liberal era is reflected in those most influential in shaping the international order. Trump likens himself to Alexander the Great, Caesar and Napoleon; Xi has conducted rounds of purges across the highest levels of power; and Putin is spending weeks in bunkers.
They are personalist, coercive actors operating through fear, technology and hard power.
New Zealand’s danger is not that it will suddenly become Russia, China or Trump’s America. The danger is that its liberal system will fail to prove competence, explain to the people what’s happening, and thus be able to forge cohesion at home.
To stress – if our elites do not understand and feel the fractures forming and deepening, and explain to the nation that they know what’s happening and collectively, across the left and right, establish a platform to respond – they will fail, and so too will the liberal regime.
We must make liberal democracy succeed: treat housing, education, health, energy, defence, infrastructure and productivity as system-critical issues. It means educating an entire population about the bewildering new information ecosystem that bombards them.