“Be strong, and be kind.” The prime minister’s words came at the close of a hastily scheduled press conference, announcing New Zealand’s first lockdown in the face of an unknown and deadly virus. For many New Zealanders, they became a catchphrase of the early pandemic, when the country succeeded in eliminating the coronavirus within its borders.
Over the coming years, they would also become synonymous with Jacinda Ardern’s politics – for her admirers, encapsulating a signature mixture of empathy and strength, and for critics, an example of soaring rhetoric not always backed by desired legislative reforms.
In 2017, Ardern became the world’s youngest serving female leader, and went on to make history as the second woman to give birth while holding elected office. Six years later, on Thursday, she made a shock announcement: she will step down at the close of the month, ending her two-term tenure before the next election in October.
Ardern’s emergence on to New Zealand’s political stage came just weeks before an election that Labour was near-universally expected to lose. “It was one of those rare moments where everything changed on the back of one force of personality,” says New Zealand political writer Toby Manhire. “When her rival, then-prime minister Bill English, spoke of her ‘stardust’ it was meant as an insult, but he was right.” On a wave of popularity dubbed “Jacindamania”, she led the party to scrape an against-the-odds victory.
Over the next six years, her leadership was shaped and defined by a series of national and international crises – and her responses in those pressured moments, which repeatedly emphasised the values of empathy, humanity and kindness, will likely form the standout legacy of her political career.
“She’s always been … a leader who is at their best in a crisis – and unfortunately, she has had her fair share,” says Madeleine Chapman, author of the unauthorised biography Jacinda Ardern: A New Kind of Leader.
In March 2019, some 18 months after Ardern’s election, New Zealand was hit by the worst terror attack in its history, when a white supremacist gunned down worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, killing 51. The words “they are us,” scrawled by Ardern on an A4 sheet of paper in the minutes after the attack, formed the centre of her speech that afternoon, embracing the immigrant and refugee communities targeted in the attack.
Images of her clad in a hijab, hugging a woman at the mosque circled the globe. Her political response – immediately denouncing the shooter as a terrorist and introducing bipartisan gun control legislation – came as a particularly sharp contrast to then-contemporary Donald Trump in the US. “The response to the terrorist attack … was just extraordinary,” says Manhire. “Empathetic, humane, but also steely, unflinching in fronting up to the uncomfortable issues it unearthed.” Those attributes would lay out a template for the most significant moments of Ardern’s leadership in the coming years.
“She has extremely good emotional intelligence – and that was really the quality that was needed, particularly during Christchurch, but also during the pandemic,” says political commentator Ben Thomas, a former staffer for the previous National government. In the first year of the pandemic, she successfully united New Zealanders behind extraordinary lockdowns to stamp out Covid-19 – a policy decision that resulted in New Zealand achieving some of the lowest rates of illness and death in the world.
That period won her enormous popularity, as well as “a global fame well out of proportion to New Zealand’s size”, Manhire says. In the overseas press, she shone bright – presenting a compelling poster child for progressive leadership in an era of growing fears about the rise of the far right, misinformation and the erosion of democratic norms.
A rare leader, a mixed legacy
At home, particularly as the pandemic years dragged on, her legacy and public image were more complex. Ardern’s government struggled to make headway on the housing crisis, which had led to huge numbers of people living on the streets, in cars, or in temporary accommodation. A vein of fiscal conservatism – ruling out a wealth tax or capital gains tax, and limiting tax take and spending – limited her government’s possibilities for large-scale, costly social programs beyond its Covid response. Despite major commitments on climate change, the country failed to meaningfully reduce its emissions.
On some of the issues closest to the prime minister’s heart, there were concrete legislative gains. Child poverty, the problem that she credited with spurring her into politics, has reduced across most measures in New Zealand, even amid the crisis of Covid 19 and the economic downturn it heralded. The government can tout core Labour victories for workers: record employment, 26 weeks of paid parental leave, increased sick leave, boosted bargaining power for low-wage sectors, the minimum wage up by over 30%. But the other reform efforts: to dramatically increase state housing numbers, revamp governance of ageing waterways, and settle on a mechanism to price agricultural emissions, have been mired in difficulty.
“When it came to designing and delivering complex legislation or sophisticated legislative reform, progress was much, much slower,” says Thomas. That mixed legacy reveals some of both the possibility and limitations of “be kind” as a guiding political principle. “The idea of kindness and empathy can hit its limits because politics is so often about tradeoffs,” Thomas says, particularly in the day-to-day struggles of governance, coalition-building and compromise.
As the pandemic continued, new challenges emerged: a small but highly vocal fringe of anti-vaccine and anti-mandate groups emerged, culminating in an explosion of violent riots on parliament’s lawns, and directing a toxic stream of death threats and violent rhetoric at the prime minister. High inflation and economic headwinds – many of them international in origin, but keenly felt in New Zealand – soured the mood of the general electorate, leading to a months-long downward slide for Ardern and Labour’s popularity. By late 2022, several successive polls had placed the centre-right National party as the most likely option to form a new government, alongside libertarian rightwing coalition partners Act.
The approaching election – now scheduled for October – was likely to be a far more gruelling battle than Ardern had ever faced previously. In 2017, she was chosen as Labour leader just weeks out from the election, leapfrogging the bitter months of campaign sparring. In the last general election in 2020, overwhelming support for the Covid response swept Labour to a near-unprecedented victory. From her early days in the political arena Ardern had always expressed a distaste for the bitter scrapping and point-scoring associated with political contests, says Chapman. “She had always said that she didn’t like that kind of type of politics, that type of campaigning. That’s exactly what this election was going to be – so I’m not surprised that she was not feeling incredibly enthusiastic about it.”
And there were other factors at play. After six years of crises and calamities, Ardern had run out of gas. “I know there’ll be much discussion in the aftermath of this decision as to what the so called ‘real reason’ was. I can tell you that what I’m sharing today is the only interesting angle that you will find - that after going on six years of some big challenges, I am human,” she said. “I know what this job takes, and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It’s that simple.”
Her daughter Neve, whom Ardern famously held as an infant at the United Nations general assembly, is now about to start school. Ardern said on Thursday that her family had made the biggest sacrifices of all. Drawing her remarks to a close, she addressed them directly. “Neve: mum is looking forward to being there when you start school this year. And to Clarke: let’s finally get married.”
As she announced her resignation – her voice occasionally cracking with emotion, Ardern returned again to the principles that formed the central pillars of her tenure.
“I hope I leave New Zealanders with a belief that you can be kind, but strong, empathetic but decisive, optimistic but focused,” she said. “And that you can be your own kind of leader – one who knows when it’s time to go.”
