Three months before New Zealand's general election, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has proposed a referendum on the country's Mixed Member Proportional voting system — a suggestion he made publicly, without consulting his coalition partners, and which has since fractured the very alliance he depends on to govern. The idea, framed as constitutional housekeeping, carries a deeper current: a leader who finds the compromises of coalition politics exhausting and who may be reaching, however clumsily, for a simpler kind of power. In democracies built on proportional representation, the tension bet