Jacinda Ardern's unexamined life

New Statesman​

5 days ago

For 24 days in February 2022 protesters occupied the grounds of New Zealand's parliament. They were mimicking the trucker 'Freedom Convoy' that had ground Canada's capital city to a standstill earlier that year in defiance over Covid-19 vaccine mandates. In Wellington, protesters were outraged about New Zealand's own vaccine mandate, but there was also palpable rage over 'masks, the media, the UN, communism and the government', recalls Jacinda Ardern, who was prime minister at the time. 'They blocked off streets and erected makeshift toilets. A few ripped masks off the faces of commuters.'
The protesters also had signs. 'I saw the American flags, the Trump flags, the swastikas,' writes Ardern, in her new memoir A Different Kind of Power. 'I saw my own image, with a Hitler moustache, a monocle and 'Dictator of the Year' emblazoned above my face. I saw the gallows, complete with a noose, which people said had been erected for me.' Such a scene would have been unimaginable five years earlier, when Ardern, as a newly installed leader of her Labour Party, rode a wave of 'Jacindamania' to become, at 37, the youngest female head of government in the world. She then bested her previous electoral performance in October 2020, months into the pandemic, by securing New Zealand's first majority government in 24 years. Yet the adulation and support that had once buoyed her premiership eventually curdled, so much so that by the time she resigned as prime minister, in January 2023, her net approval rating in the country had plummeted to just 15.
As Ardern presents it, she was always a reluctant politician. Growing up in small towns on New Zealand's North Island, she was often surrounded by grinding poverty, particularly in Murupara, a small, remote forestry town the family moved to when Ardern's father, a police officer, was offered a job there. In an interview as a new MP, a reporter asked her when she first became political and, thinking of the town's economic struggles, Ardern responded, 'I became political because I lived in Murupara.'
Despite this, Ardern describes her own childhood as happy. The Arderns were Mormons and, growing up, Jacinda was devoted to the religion. Going door-knocking for the church in her youth laid the foundation for political canvassing: 'I was already starting to prepare for a role I could never imagine holding.' It wasn't until she was in her twenties and had already started working as an adviser in the Labour Party that she began to interrogate her faith. She believed politics was the surest way to bring about positive change to people's lives, but she was increasingly confronted with tenets of her faith that ran counter to her liberal progressive 'values' – particularly regarding same-sex unions. At first, she would simply 'compartmentalise', mentally separating the clashing realities of her religion and her political beliefs, but as she got older and her career in politics progressed, she found that often difficult to do. She eventually left the church, a decision her family accepted gracefully.
Ardern's rise in front-line politics might have been embarked upon reluctantly, but it was rapid. She had moved to London and was working as an adviser in Tony Blair's Cabinet Office when a former colleague called to convince her to return to New Zealand to run as an MP herself. She entered parliament the following year, but she was doubtful about her abilities. 'If there was any place that being a sensitive overthinker was going to trouble me, it would be here,' she thought at the time. Yet Ardern became determined to turn her weakness into a political strength – to make her lack of cynicism and her empathy the defining features of her politics.
Her uncertainty over becoming prime minister in 2017 – after a surprise surge in support allowed her Labour Party to form a coalition government with the populist New Zealand First party and the Greens – had less to do with any nagging feelings of imposter syndrome and more to do with the fact that she was a few weeks pregnant. She was nervous about how the public would respond to a prime minister taking maternity leave, and her initial scans were clandestine affairs, carefully orchestrated and kept secret from even her security detail. A physician friend of a friend, who would meet with her in his clinic after hours, used the code name Kilgore Trout, a character from Kurt Vonnegut's novels, on all of her medical paperwork. When she finally did announce her pregnancy to the public, she was overwhelmed by support from New Zealanders and the world. While Ardern writes movingly about the private struggles of becoming a mother for the first time while also leading a government, publicly the perception was again one of strength: when Ardern brought three-month-old Neve to a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, she was celebrated as a trailblazer.
Apart from the Covid pandemic, the defining event of Ardern's premiership was the Christchurch mosque shooting. On a Friday afternoon in March 2019, a 28-year-old man, recently arrived from Australia, walked into the Al Noor Mosque armed with several semi-automatic weapons and opened fire, livestreaming the attack on Facebook. He then made his way to Linwood Islamic Centre and once again started shooting. He was stopped by police while on his way to a third mosque. In total, 51 were killed, dozens more were injured. Ardern's response to the attack – which included swiftly banning semi-automatic guns and a public address in which she said of the victims: 'They are us. The person who has perpetuated this violence against us is not' – burnished her reputation at home and abroad as a compassionate leader.
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By the time the pandemic arrived on New Zealand's shores, the country still trusted Ardern. Her coalition government embraced a zero-Covid strategy, attempting to eradicate the virus completely – this meant an initial strict lockdown and the complete closure of the borders. That strategy worked at first: New Zealand had the lowest death toll out of all OECD countries, while schools remained largely open and hospitals weren't overwhelmed. Public support for Ardern was so strong that Labour won a landslide election in October 2020, allowing her to form a majority government. Yet by the time Covid's more slippery variants appeared, the strategy's effectiveness started to falter – longer and longer lockdowns were required, including one in Auckland that lasted 107 days. By the time the vaccine was rolled out in New Zealand, much of the solidarity in the country had evaporated. Hostility – toward restrictions, toward vaccines, and most of all, toward Ardern herself – took hold. Threats of violence and death against the prime minister and her family surged each year as the pandemic dragged on.
Yet few of these details make it into Ardern's account, who writes vaguely about unspecified regrets. 'I still think about this time so often,' she writes of the protest outside parliament, 'not just the occupation, but the two years that preceded it, those long days and impossible choices.' While it's certainly likely that she has spent a long time dwelling on those regrets and impossible choices – overthinker that she is – she doesn't detail what mistakes she thinks she made or share what lessons she took away from this period. Bafflingly, Ardern devotes more pages to her relationship with Prince William over the years than she gives to an entire year of her premiership during the pandemic; 2021, with its variants and lockdowns and increasing radicalisation, is covered in just a page and a half. Why? Is she once again compartmentalising? This was clearly a monumental time for her; she resigned as prime minister in January 2023, before the end of her term.
It's clear that Ardern is intent on forging on with her brand of compassionate leadership – it's the throughline of her book, the subject of a documentary about her time in office, Prime Minister, that was also released this year, as well as the focus of her fellowship at Harvard (she and her family have lived in Boston since mid 2023). But she doesn't reckon with the fact that, while more empathetic leadership is a worthy goal, far more people would prefer effective leadership. Ardern made a global name for herself by embodying the former and there's clearly potential for her to capitalise on that momentum outside New Zealand. When it comes to the latter, however, it's hard to argue that Ardern had much lasting success. Her government failed to make a dent in child poverty, despite it being an animating issue of her politics; many of the reforms she implemented while in office to tackle New Zealand's housing crisis were reversed by the next government. This also goes unmentioned in A Different Kind of Power.
The most generous interpretation is that she – like many incumbents around the world who were punished at the ballot box once the pandemic waned – is still reckoning with the many 'hard, imperfect' decisions that may have triggered the backlash against her. A much less generous interpretation is that she simply doesn't see the value in publicly grappling with failure. Perhaps she is now satisfied with being a symbol of a type of politics, rather than continuing on with the hard graft of actual politics.
A Different Kind of Power
Jacinda Ardern
Macmillan, 352pp, £25
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