Jacinda Ardern Became a Worldwide Phenomenon. Then She Walked Away.

Yahoo

17-03-2025

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Jacinda Ardern was just 37 years old when she captured the hearts of the globe. Elected prime minister of New Zealand in 2017, a race she won a mere seven weeks after entering the contest, she was the youngest female head of state, one of just 13 women premiers worldwide—a progressive who promised to combat climate change, support abortion rights, and make her country the best place in the world to be a child.
They called it 'Jacindamania.' It was the first time many in the U.S. had known the name of the person leading the small South Pacific nation, let alone followed her every history-making move. She won fans around the world and made headlines for having an equal number of women and men in parliament; for being the second head of state in history to give birth while in office; for taking parental leave; for being unmarried; for having her partner, Clarke Gayford, stay home with their daughter, Neve, while she went back to work.
She was called the 'anti-Trump' for the kindness and collaborative spirit she exuded on the world stage—an antidote to the rise of populist strongmen in countries like Brazil and Hungary. She was also praised for her empathetic leadership style in the face of a deadly volcano eruption and mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch that claimed 51 lives (she embraced the Muslim community in New Zealand in the days that followed—saying 'They are us' and wearing a headscarf and hugging mourners—and announced a ban on assault rifles six days later). In October 2020, Ardern was reelected in a landslide, her popularity fueled by her deft handling of the COVID pandemic. And then, after over five years in office, in January 2023, she shocked the world when she announced her resignation, saying, with tears in her eyes, that she didn't have 'enough left in the tank' to do the job justice.
Three months later, in a viral speech—her final before Parliament—Ardern reflected on her legacy: 'I cannot determine what will define my time in this place,' she said, swathed in a traditional Maori cloak. 'But I do hope I've demonstrated something else entirely: that you can be anxious, sensitive, kind, and wear your heart on your sleeve. You can be a mother, or not. You can be an ex-Mormon, or not. You can be a nerd, a crier, a hugger—you can be all of these things. And not only can you be here, you can lead. Just like me.'
With those words, Ardern left New Zealand politics behind, but she didn't exactly take time off. 'I am what you might call an active relaxer,' the now 44-year-old former prime minister tells me as we sip cappuccinos at Henrietta's Table, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, institution, adjacent to her office in the Harvard Kennedy School, that serves up skillet hash and large flaky biscuits. 'I have taken a bit of time. But I have not felt like I've slowed down. I still feel like I've been busy, busy.'
She's deliberately kept a lower profile, enjoying some time as an observer rather than a central figure on the world stage. But behind the scenes, Ardern has been as devoted as ever to the issues that came to define her time as prime minister: combating extremism and injecting more kindness into politics. She holds three fellowships at Harvard—as an Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Fellow, a Hauser Leader at the Center for Public Leadership, and a Senior Fellow in the Women and Public Policy Program. The fellowships were originally meant to last for three months but have been extended. 'I had some hesitancy about leaving New Zealand,' she says. 'But it's been a nice break.'
One of her favorite things has been talking with students during office hours. When I marvel over the opportunity students have had to meet with a former prime minister, she stresses, 'Oh, but what an opportunity for me.' She's usually fairly incognito walking around campus: coat, backpack, AirPods in, head down. But she is occasionally recognized, particularly by international students. New Zealanders are unfazed, she says: 'It'll just be like, 'Oh hi, Jacinda.''
Last summer, in partnership with the Center for American Progress Action Fund, she founded the Field Fellowship for Empathetic Leadership 'to support and connect leaders who embrace an alternative form of leadership.' Clearly modeled on Ardern herself, the fellowship 'centers on pragmatic idealism and draws on the strength of kindness and empathy to develop and build public support for progressive policy solutions to complex problems.' Ardern is also one of 12 global leaders to receive a $20 million grant from Melinda French Gates's Pivotal Ventures, a sum she's been entrusted with distributing to charitable organizations she deems to be doing 'urgent, impactful, and innovative work to improve women's health and well-being globally.' She also continues to work with Christchurch Call, the initiative she cofounded with French President Emmanuel Macron in the wake of the shootings, dedicated to eliminating terrorist and violent extremist content online.$29.76 at bookshop.org
When we meet, she is jet-lagged, having returned from New Zealand just a few days prior, after spending time with family over the holidays. Her daughter, now 6, is struggling with the time difference and has been waking up at 4:30 A.M. Ardern is only in town for a few days before she'll jet off to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and from there to Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival, where a documentary she's the subject of, Prime Minister, will premiere. Not long after that, she's due to attend a climate event in Paris as part of her work as a board member of Prince William's Earthshot Prize.
Between the film and the publication of her memoir, A Different Kind of Power, coming June 3, Ardern is gearing up for the increased exposure. 'I have to get used to being out there again,' she tells me. 'There are trade-offs. Sometimes I think about the ease of having a smaller world and a smaller profile—it's much easier to be in the world that way.' But she wonders if she can continue to make an impact at that size: 'Can I be useful and small?' she asks. 'I don't know if I can. Since leaving office, that's what I've grappled with—how can I still be useful? And I probably can't be useful and stay small.'
Ardern grew up in Morrinsville, a rural dairy farming community on North Island, about two hours south of Auckland (today, the town of 8,500 people is dotted with 60 fiberglass cow sculptures). Her grandparents worked in the industry—her mom's side were dairy farmers, while her paternal grandfather was a drain digger. Her father worked as a policeman for 40 years, while her mom mostly worked jobs that allowed her to be home when the kids were home. Ardern was raised Mormon, but left the faith as a young adult because of the church's stance on LGBTQ issues.
When Ardern was in high school, her mom ran the canteen in the school cafeteria, a 'hole-in-the-wall tuck shop' with sandwiches and meat pies for the hungry teens. Ardern was close with her sister, just 18 months her senior. (Her sister still lives in New Zealand; she is a scientist by training and owns a cybersecurity business with her husband.)
Her parents had an orchard when Ardern was young, where she learned to drive a tractor and roamed free among the fruit trees for hours in the summertime, her mom telling her to be back by dinner. She rode her bike to school, often showing up for class barefoot, which she assures me is the New Zealand way.
Her introduction to politics came from an aunt who was active in the Labour Party. 'I don't remember there being any point where I sat down and analyzed all the political parties,' Ardern says. 'I just remember having a team and knowing that this was the party that aligned most with the way I saw the world.' She joined the party at age 17 and was voted 'Most Likely to Be Prime Minister' by her classmates. She says the prescient title was bestowed upon her simply because she was the only one in school who belonged to a political party, but then adds, 'It's very easy for me to dismiss it.' But there were signs she was meant for this life.
She was on the high school debate team; she and a friend started a human rights action group and wrote letters for Amnesty International. One of her friends likes to remind her that she was often trying to find ways to help others. She once campaigned for girls to be allowed to wear pants to school (many public schools have uniforms in New Zealand, and girls were often required to wear skirts). 'I can tell you it was not on behalf of fashion. It was just very pragmatic—it was cold in the winter,' she says. 'But that was my first time campaigning.'
The fire had been lit. By the time she finished high school, she knew she wanted to make a difference in the world, and she understood politics as the way to do that. She studied professional communications and international relations at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, the nearby city where she was born. After graduation, she began working as a junior adviser to Helen Clark, the country's second female prime minister. (New Zealand was the first country in the world to allow women to vote, in 1893, and has now had three women heads of state.) Following that, she spent time overseas: six months in New York City, sleeping on a friend's couch in Brooklyn and volunteering at a Catholic soup kitchen because she didn't have a work permit. Then she was off to London, where she worked in the Cabinet Office as a civil servant.
Two years later, in 2008, someone put her name on a list in a winnable district, and just like that, she was elected to Parliament and returned home. She was the youngest member of the body at the time and felt like it: 'I remember feeling like, 'Do I go buy suits now? Do I change who I am?' And I made quite a conscious decision to just be myself.'
She held on to that commitment nearly 10 years later when she was tapped to run for prime minister. The former party leader, an older man who had served for many years, resigned following bad poll numbers when the election was just seven weeks away. The party desperately needed a boost from a younger candidate. (Sound familiar?) As deputy leader, Ardern was up. 'There was no time to redesign myself, or for anyone to tell me who I needed to be,' she says. 'So that was quite freeing—I could just be myself.' Her slogan was direct: 'Let's do this.' She jokes that an alternative slogan could have been, 'This is happening, folks!'
On Oct. 26, 2017, she was sworn in as prime minister—around the same time as she learned she was pregnant. She understands being the second elected world leader to give birth while in office is part of why she got such outsize attention (the first was Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto in 1990), but says, 'Those are the things we don't want to be novel. The day we've made progress is the day it's not worth commenting on.' When it came to taking leave, and having Gayford stay home with Neve, she wasn't trying to be revolutionary. 'We were just thinking, 'How do we make this work? And how do I keep doing my job?'' she says, noting that she only ever experienced the job either pregnant or as a mom: 'So you just build your normal around it.'
Living in a 'small country at the bottom of the world,' she says, Kiwis aren't used to people paying them much attention. 'You don't really step out to do your job on the world stage thinking about what anyone other than the people in your country think about the work you're doing,' she says of experiencing 'Jacindamania.' 'My instinct is always to discount anything that feels like it might be a distraction, or isn't about getting us to where we need to be. So I was very dismissive of it. I had a job to do.'
But it was impossible to ignore the eyes on her altogether. 'In a way, it raised expectations, and I was always afraid of not meeting those,' she says. She tells me about a time, years before, when she had moved up in the ranks of her party. A member of the opposition came over, shook her hand in congratulations, and then told her there was only one way to go from there: down. He was wrong, of course—she would go on to climb higher—but '[the idea was] that once you've reached a pinnacle, then you inevitably fall. And it really struck me,' she says. 'So with any good poll, or with the so-called mania, in the back of my mind would be, 'What comes after this? Where do I take us next?' And so that was always the way I viewed the world—anticipating the downside of things.'
'It makes it very hard to celebrate in the moment, because you're constantly [worrying],' she continues. 'But the upside is, it means that you never dwell too much, and you're constantly looking for the thing that you can do next to help, to take you further, to succeed.'
Over time, she says, it started to feel like every day was a test: 'I remember the commentary for any crisis would be, 'This will be a test of her leadership.' And then the next one would come, and they'd say it again. And I realized that actually there was no point at which anyone would conclude that I had proven myself,' she says. 'But I do remember, at the point when I concluded that it was time to go, I felt like I didn't need to do that anymore.'
The night before announcing her decision to the world, she was speaking to a senior member of the party, explaining her reasoning. 'She said to me, 'I totally understand, but what are you going to tell the public?' And I said, 'That.'' She couldn't conceive of saying anything other than the truth.
'When it came time to leave, it wasn't because I felt like I wasn't strong enough to keep going. It was simply that the 5 years felt more like 10, and I realized that should another crisis present itself—which it could at any time—I knew I didn't have the extra that was required,' she tells me. 'If I had stayed on, then I wouldn't be doing the best job I could. I could keep going, but I wouldn't have done the job justice, and I wanted to be open about that.'
She was a bit bothered that the dominant narrative became that she was 'burned out,' because that's not how she felt. 'In my mind, burnout is, you're in a fetal position in the corner of the room. You're done. You're tapped out. It's over,' she says. 'And I wasn't there.'
'Burnout is a very legitimate reason for people to say, 'I need time.' It just wasn't an accurate reflection for me. It was a bit more nuanced than that,' she continues. 'I'm very actively trying to work on issues that I still care about, because that's what gets me out of bed in the morning. And yes, I still get out of bed in the morning. There's not a lot of sleeping in. Especially with a 6-year-old.'
She didn't want to rattle off the typical politician exit line: 'I'm leaving to spend more time with my family.' 'When you're only the second woman to have a baby in office, I felt so conscious about what I was telling people about the experience,' she says. 'I didn't want to say that, because it implies that you can't have a family and be in these jobs—and you can. I hated the idea of leaving a message that, 'Actually, I'm leaving because it's not possible to have a family and feel like a present person.'' She also didn't want to imply that her family was pressuring her to leave office. 'I felt like it was almost putting the decision on them, saying my family doesn't want me to stay.'
Toward the end of our conversation, we get to talking about how to increase the number of women in politics. She admits, 'Politics has always been a hard place to be, but for a whole range of reasons, it certainly feels like it's getting harder. People are in the spotlight; there's a 24/7 media cycle and constant online critique. There's very little room for error; there's very little privacy. It's a hard place to be. And does that mean good people will opt out? I think it does. So how do we keep attracting good people to public leadership? That's one of our challenges.'
She's doing her part through her Field Fellowship for Empathetic Leadership. The inspiration to create it came from people who found the way she responded to the Christchurch tragedy remarkable. 'It felt to me like any human in my shoes would have responded in that way. And yet, if it was notable, what did that say about how leaders are taught that they are meant to be?' she says. 'So I started thinking about what would have made it easier to be an empathetic leader in office. I felt strongly that actually having people around me who viewed leadership in the same way would have probably been quite helpful, and so that's where the fellowship came from.'
The first cohort was all women. A coincidence, perhaps—men are welcome—but perhaps not a surprise, as kindness is generally seen as a female trait, one of many perceptions Ardern hopes to shift. 'The one thing that I wanted to see more of in politics was the humanity,' she says. 'There have been, in the past, times when some leaders haven't felt like they could show emotion—times when that would have been seen as weakness—but that will only change when people start showing that you can be those things and still demonstrate strength as well.'
In June 2023, five months after stepping down, she announced her book deal on Instagram, saying she didn't want to put out a typical political memoir that raked over every policy decision in boring detail. Instead, she said she planned to write a book that would have made a difference to her 14-year-old self, the young woman from small-town cattle country, who would have benefited from knowing she could be her own brand of leader.
Ardern tells me the book is ultimately about how it feels to lead, especially if you're someone who couldn't envision that life for yourself. She wrote it herself, no coauthor or ghostwriter, largely over the summer when, yes, she was supposed to be taking a break. She is honest that the process was brutal for her and left her feeling vulnerable. 'It's very personal,' she says of the finished book. 'I hope there's something in there for anyone who's experienced self-doubt, because I don't think we talk about that a lot, but I'm in a position now where I can.'
'If you want to make a difference in the world,' she adds, 'Sometimes it requires you to put yourself out there.'
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Hair and makeup by Kacie Corbelle; photographed at The Newbury Boston.
A version of this story appears in the April 2025 issue of ELLE.
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