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New Statesman
10 hours ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
Jacinda Ardern's unexamined life
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. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 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 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops Related [See also:
Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Jacinda Ardern Became a Worldwide Phenomenon. Then She Walked Away.
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." 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 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.' WOMEN OF IMPACT 2025READ THE STORYREAD THE STORY Hair and makeup by Kacie Corbelle; photographed at The Newbury Boston. A version of this story appears in the April 2025 issue of ELLE. Shop Now You Might Also Like The 15 Best Organic And Clean Shampoos For Any And All Hair Types 100 Gifts That Are $50 Or Under (And Look Way More Expensive Than They Actually Are)
The Guardian
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Prime Minister: Jacinda Ardern documentary featuring home videos premieres at Sundance
A documentary traversing former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern's leadership and personal life through home videos, archival footage and fresh interviews has premiered at Sundance. The film, Prime Minister, directed by Michelle Walshe and Lindsay Utz covers Ardern's five-year tenure, after her abrupt ascension to leader of the Labour party in 2017, just six weeks out from an election her party was widely expected to lose. On a wave of popularity dubbed 'Jacindamania', the then-37-year-old led the party to victory, becoming the world's then-youngest ever female leader. Speaking to the Sundance audience, Ardern said she hoped the film would help humanise people in leadership. '[The film-makers] took the opportunity to tell the whole story – the highs, the lows, the good, the bad, and the ugly.' Ardern's shock win was quickly followed by a succession of head-turning events, including becoming the world's second leader to give birth while in office and grappling with national crises including the country's worst terror attack and the Covid-19 pandemic. Ardern's brand of politics, which repeatedly emphasised the values of empathy, humanity and kindness, catapulted her into a global icon of the left. Towards the end of her time in office, Ardern's legacy at home became more complicated, and she faced criticism over her government's failure to make headway on its promises to fix the housing crisis and meaningfully reduce emissions. As the pandemic wore on, a small but vocal fringe of anti-vaccine and anti-mandate groups emerged, leading to a violent protest on parliament's lawns and threatening rhetoric directed at Ardern. Ardern shocked New Zealanders in January 2023 when she said she was stepping down because she no longer had 'enough in the tank'. The film features home-footage, shot by Ardern's husband, Clarke Gayford. Speaking to Deadline, Ardern said the impetus to keep personal records of her time in office, both through home video and via an oral history project, was sparked by her appreciation for history and a desire to keep a record for her family. She also hoped it would also serve as an acknowledgment of Gayford. 'When you are in public office, there's not always a lot of light shone on the people who are supporting you, in the village that's around you … I didn't do the job alone and I didn't raise my daughter on my own.' In an promotional video for Sundance, the directors said they had 'an embarrassment of riches' when it came to material for the film. 'Not only the incredibly intimate footage that Clarke, her husband gathered, but these classified audio diaries that gave us a glimpse into what she was feeling in the moment,' Utz said. Since leaving office, Ardern has taken up dual fellowship roles at Harvard University, continued her work on the Christchurch Call – a project she established to combat online extremism, after the Christchurch mosque shootings – and joined the board of trustees of Prince William's Earthshot prize. Last week, she announced the release of her upcoming memoir, A Different Kind of Power.
