“Be strong and be kind.” The Prime Minister’s words came at the end of a hastily planned press conference announcing New Zealand’s first lockdown amid an unknown and deadly virus. For many New Zealanders, they became an early-pandemic catchphrase as the country managed to eliminate the coronavirus within its borders.
In the years to come, they also became synonymous with the politics of Jacinda Ardern – a characteristic blend of empathy and strength for her admirers and an example of high-flying rhetoric not always supported by desired legislative reforms for critics.
In 2017, Ardern became the world’s youngest incumbent female leader, making history as the second woman to give birth to a child while in office. Six years later, on Thursday, she made a shock announcement: She will step down at the end of the month, ending her two-year term before the next election in October.
Ardern’s appearance on the New Zealand political stage came just weeks before an election that Labor was almost universally expected to lose. “It was one of those rare moments where everything changed based on a single personality,” says New Zealand politics writer Toby Manhire. “When her rival, then-Prime Minister Bill English, called her ‘stardust,’ it was meant as an insult, but he was right.” Riding a popularity wave dubbed ‘Jacindamania’, she led the party to victory against all odds.
Over the next six years, her leadership was shaped and defined by a series of national and international crises – and her reactions in those stressed moments, which repeatedly emphasized the values of empathy, humanity and kindness, will likely form the preeminent legacy of her political career.
“She’s always been… a leader who’s at her best in times of crisis — and unfortunately, she has her fair share,” says Madeleine Chapman, author of the unauthorized 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 terrorist attack in its history when a white supremacist gunned down worshipers at two Christchurch mosques, killing 51. The words “they are us” scrawled on an A4 sheet of paper in the minutes following the attack formed the center of Ardern’s speech that afternoon, embracing the immigrant and refugee communities targeted by the attack.
Pictures of her in a hijab embracing a woman in the mosque went around the world. Their political response — to immediately denounce the shooter as a terrorist and introduce a bipartisan gun control law — was in particularly sharp contrast to that of Donald Trump at the time in the United States. “The response to the terrorist attack … was just extraordinary,” says Manhire. “Empathetic, human but also steely, unabashed when it comes to confronting the uncomfortable issues it uncovered.” Those attributes would set a template for the key moments of Ardern’s leadership in the years to come.
“She has extremely good emotional intelligence – and that was really the quality that was needed, especially during Christchurch but also during the pandemic,” says political commentator Ben Thomas, a former staffer of the previous national government. In the first year of the pandemic, it successfully united New Zealanders behind extraordinary lockdowns to stamp out Covid-19 – a policy decision that resulted in New Zealand reaching some of the lowest disease and death rates in the world.
This period brought her enormous popularity and “world fame out of proportion to New Zealand’s size,” says Manhire. She shone brightly in the foreign press – presenting a compelling poster child for progressive leadership at a time of growing fears of the rise of the far right, misinformation and the erosion of democratic norms.
A rare leader, a mixed heritage
At home, her legacy and public image were more complex, especially as the pandemic years dragged on. Ardern’s government struggled to bolster the housing crisis, which had left large numbers of people living on the streets, in cars or in temporary shelters. A streak of fiscal conservatism — excluding a wealth or capital gains tax and capping tax receipts and spending — limited her government’s options for large-scale, costly social programs beyond its Covid response. Despite major commitments to climate change, the country has not managed to significantly reduce its emissions.
Concrete legislative progress was made on some issues dear to the Prime Minister’s heart. Child poverty, the problem she credits with driving her into politics, has declined in most measures in New Zealand, even amid the Covid-19 crisis and related economic downturn. The government can announce major Labor achievements to workers: record jobs, 26 weeks of paid parental leave, more sick leave, increased bargaining power for low-wage sectors, increase in the minimum wage by over 30%. But the other reform efforts: drastically increasing government housing, overhauling the management of aging waterways and agreeing on a mechanism to price agricultural emissions have run into trouble.
“Progress has been much, much slower when it comes to designing and implementing complex laws or challenging legislative reforms,” says Thomas. This mixed heritage reveals both the possibilities and limitations of “be kind” as a guiding principle. “The idea of kindness and empathy can reach its limits because politics is so often about compromise,” Thomas says, particularly in the day-to-day struggles of governance, coalition building, and compromise.
As the pandemic dragged on, new challenges emerged: a small but vocal fringe of anti-vaccine and anti-mandatory groups emerged, culminating in an explosion of violent rioting on Parliament lawns and a poisonous torrent of death threats and violent rhetoric prime minister aimed at parliament. High inflation and economic headwinds – many of them international in origin but felt strongly in New Zealand – weighed on the mood of the general electorate and led to a months-long downward trend in Ardern’s and Labor’s popularity. By the end of 2022, consecutive polls had ranked the centre-right National party as the most likely option for forming a new government alongside the centre-right coalition partner Act.
The upcoming election – now scheduled for October – would likely be a far more grueling struggle than Ardern had ever faced before. In 2017, she was elected Labor leader just weeks before the election, skipping the bitter months of campaign sparring. At the last general election of 2020, overwhelming support for the Covid Labor response led to a near-unprecedented victory. From her early days in the political arena, Ardern has always expressed a distaste for the bitter scrapping and point-scoring associated with political competitions, Chapman says. “She always said she didn’t like that kind of politics, that kind of campaigning. That’s what this election was supposed to be – so it doesn’t surprise me that she wasn’t incredibly excited about it.”
And there were other factors at play. After six years of crises and disasters, Ardern had run out of gas. “I know that after this decision there will be a lot of discussion about what the so-called ‘real reason’ was. I can tell you that what I’m sharing with you today is the only interesting angle you’re going to find – that after six years with some big challenges, I’m human,” she said. “I know what this job takes and I know I don’t have enough in the tank left to do it justice. As simple as that.”
Their daughter Neve, who Ardern famously kept as a toddler at the United Nations General Assembly, is now about to start school. Ardern said Thursday that her family made the greatest sacrifice of all. She finished her remarks and addressed them directly. “Neve: Mom is looking forward to being there when you start school this year. And to Clarke: Let’s finally get married.”
In announcing her resignation – her voice occasionally cracking with emotion – Ardern returned to the principles that were the central pillars of her tenure.
“I hope I leave New Zealanders believing that you can be kind but strong, empathetic but determined, optimistic but focused,” she said. “And that you can be your own kind of leader — one who knows when it’s time to go.”