New Zealand's Prime Minister John Key and his wife Bronagh place their votes into a ballot box at Parnell Primary School in Auckland, New Zealand, in the morning of the country's general election, Saturday, Nov. 26, 2011. (AP Photo/NZ Herald, Brett Phibbs) AUSTRALIA OUT, NEW ZEALAND OUT
New Zealand's Prime Minister John Key and his wife Bronagh place their votes into a ballot box at Parnell Primary School in Auckland, New Zealand, in the morning of the country's general election, Saturday, Nov. 26, 2011. (AP Photo/NZ Herald, Brett Phibbs) AUSTRALIA OUT, NEW ZEALAND OUT
Labour leader Phil Goff places his vote in a ballot box at Wesley Intermediate School in Sandringham, New Zealand, in the morning of the country's general election, Saturday, Nov. 26, 2011. (AP Photo/NZ Herald, Dean Purcell) AUSTRALIA OUT, NEW ZEALAND OUT
In this photo taken Thursday, Nov. 24, 2011, New Zealand's Prime Minister John Key holds 13-month-old Tyler Reeves during his campaign stopover in Levin, New Zealand. Key enters New Zealand's elections Saturday with an overwhelming popularity undimmed by an eleventh-hour scandal and with a historic chance to win an outright majority for his center-right party. (AP Photo/New Zealand Herald, Mark Mitchell) NEW ZEALAND OUT, AUSTRALIA OUT
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) ? Early results from New Zealand's general election Saturday showed that Prime Minister John Key's National Party was teetering on the edge of having enough votes to govern alone.
With polls closed and about one-third of the votes counted, the National Party was winning 50 percent of the overall vote ? which would give it a thin majority of 62 seats out of a total 121. Anything short of a majority, however, and Key would need to find political partners to form a stable government.
If the early results hold, Key's National Party would be the first party to secure a majority on its own since the country abolished a winner-takes-all voting system and replaced it in 1996 with a proportional one that generally results in a more fractured parliament.
And if the party finishes with more than half the total vote, it will be the first time that has been achieved by any party in 60 years.
In other early results, the Labour party was getting 26 percent of the vote and the Green party 11 percent.
It appeared the New Zealand First party would return to parliament after making a late charge in the campaign. The party had 6.8 percent of the vote in early results, above the minimum 5 percent threshold needed.
The election has been driven by Key's personal popularity. After three years in power, polls have shown the former currency trader is far more popular than the Labour party leader, Phil Goff. Key has earned the nickname "Teflon John" for the way that nothing politically damaging seems to stick to him.
"He's a clever strategist and a good manager," said Jennifer Lees-Marshment, a political studies lecturer at the University of Auckland.
She said Key has been adept at knowing when to forge ahead with policies and when to pull back. His common touch was reassuring to people when a deadly earthquake struck Christchurch last February, she said, and enabled him to share in their excitement in October when the country's national All Blacks team won the Rugby World Cup.
Key's campaign has focused primarily on the economy. He's promising to bring the country back into surplus and begin paying down the national debt within three years. Part of his plan to achieve that is to sell minority stakes in four government-owned energy companies and in Air New Zealand.
That's where the center-left Labour party found its biggest point of difference. During the campaign, Goff promised not to sell anything and to raise money by other means, including by introducing a capital gains tax and by raising the age at which people get government pensions by two years, to 67.
On the campaign trail, however, those issues got crowded out by a mini-scandal known as the teapot tape saga. While meeting at a tea shop with a political ally, Key reportedly made rude and embarrassing political comments that were captured on a recording device left by a cameraman.
Key complained to police on the grounds that it's illegal to record a private conversation, and the tape never went public.
Lees-Marshment said she thinks voters grew tired of the attention given to the story and may have begun feeling more sympathetic toward Key.
"It became a story about the story," she said. "The voters got put off by it."
The saga certainly didn't seem to do much to boost the campaign of Goff, who was effectively shut out of any coverage for a few days. Labour's lackluster result has pundits speculating Goff will be replaced as leader of the party within days of the election.
But the saga did seem to boost the fortunes of Winston Peters, who leads the small New Zealand First party. Peters grabbed the headlines with pointed criticism of Key over the affair and his poll numbers shot up.
Early results also indicated the Green party would get about 13 seats, a result leaders would be happy with.
Voters were also deciding on whether to keep their electoral system, in which parties get a proportion of parliamentary seats based on the proportion of the votes they receive. Some wanted to return to a winner-takes-all format, although polls indicated most favored sticking with their current system.
In early results, about 54 percent of voters were favoring keeping the proportional system.
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