Political satire is having a renaissance during the 2026 election campaign

Fuelled by social media and AI, political satire is having something of a renaissance during the 2026 election campaign

Two of the most prominent examples are 'Beehiving Badly', a satire page featuring South Park-style animated videos of New Zealand politicians which that appeared on social media in July, and Carpool Coalition which first began posting content in August.

Both pages explore similar territory, critiquing and satirising the key figures of the coalition goverment.

RNZ asked Winston Peters what he thought of his depiction in 'Carpool Coalition' where he is shown as grumpy, sweary and perpetually smoking.

"I haven't seen it. It's a lie, and I don't smoke," Peters said.

While he may not have seen the social media-based satire pages, Peters has witnessed and been featured in New Zealand satire dating back to the 1980s including 'Public Eye', a satirical puppet show and 'Facelift' which used actors with extreme prosthetics.

Peters isn't a fan of the modern iterations."It's just plain nasty. It comes from the same, usually from the left or sometimes from the extreme right."

Peters has a point about the political direction the satire comes from. 'Carpool Coaltion' and 'Beehiving Badly' both almost exclusively target the coalition government. Neither page agreed to be inteviewed for this story and RNZ hasn't been able to establish who runs the pages.

Dr Nicholas Holm is an associate professor of media studies at Massey University and said when satirists relied on mainstream television broadcasts, they literally couldn't afford to have visible political leanings.

"I'd say the ultimate gatekeeper here is money. In a media environment the size of New Zealand, you can't call half your potential audience idiots because it's not economically viable."

But social media and artificial intelligence has changed all that, meaning creators can make their content quickly and cheaply.

"The beauty of that is that you can adopt hyper-partisan positions that lead to a very narrow audience because you don't need their money."

Some satirists don't rely on animated content though. Ben Uffindell has resurrected his 'Civilian' website for the 2026 campaign. The Civilian focusses on written articles and takes aim at politicans all along the spectrum. It began in 2013 but has only posted sporadically since 2021.

"When you write enough satire you sort of run the well dry a little bit", Uffindell said. "The news is like a series of the same stories occurring over and over and over again and you kind of feel like, oh, I'm just satirising the same thing.

The reason I felt comfortable coming back is because the environment has changed so much with social media and the way we talk about politics today that I felt like there's enough material here to really move it forward."

Uffindell said targets weren't as easy to come by these days.

"I actually feel like this is a bad period for satire because leaders of the parties are not exciting.They're not interesting. They're not people ripe for satire. When I was writing originally, we had John Key and he was very ripe for satire. He was like a low hanging fruit almost. I don't think we have that now.

"At the same time, we do have a very interesting political environment. So I think what's right for satire is the environment, is this kind of dynamic of having our first true MMP election with our major parties probably being under 30 percent. But we don't have like a singular figure who's interesting or dynamic and in its own way that's ripe for satire, but I don't think there's a leader who's ripe for it."

Holm said a lack of profitability was one of the reasons satire shows appeared and disappeared relatively quickly, but there were also deeper issues.

"We don't in our national conversation have much appetite to talk about politics in a sustained way, whether it's serious or satire. We don't really have political conversations about big ideas and satire kind of needs those, to really work. So I think satire is most successful when it's trying to do something 'thinky' and big, and it's just not really the tone of our political conversation most of the time"