A different kind of power: a memoir, by Jacinda Ardern (Macmillan, £25 / €19.99)
Jacinda Ardern was aged 37 when she became the fortieth prime minister of New Zealand in 2017, the youngest person to hold that office since 1856. She was the third woman to fill the role.
This memoir traces her humble beginnings in a rural Mormon community, her early involvement in politics as a Labour Party activist and advisor to a succession of MPs (including Helen Clarke, prime minister from 1999 to 2008) and then her years in public office – as MP from 2008 to 2023 and prime minister from 2017 to 2023. She left the Mormon church in 2005 because it conflicted with her progressive values.
In her first interview as prime minister, Ardern said that she wanted her government “to feel different … it’s going to bring kindness back”. She admits that may have seemed a bit naive, but “kindness … would be my guiding principle no matter what lay ahead”.
Her response to the terrorist mass shootings of Muslims at Friday prayers in Christchurch in March 2019 epitomised her style of leadership”
She was a breath of fresh air after nine years of staid conservative government in New Zealand, evoking the same sense of a new political order that had been experienced when Barack Obama was elected US president in 2008. Her politics of empathy and compassion resonated globally, contrasting with the squalor of Donald Trump’s first term as US president and the post-Brexit chaos in British politics.
Her response to the terrorist mass shootings of Muslims at Friday prayers in Christchurch in March 2019 epitomised her style of leadership. Altogether 51 people were killed and 89 others injured. Noting that “many of the people affected by this extreme violence will be from refugee and emigrant communities”, Ardern asserted unambiguously that “New Zealand is their home. They are us.”
Families
She then travelled to Christchurch to meet the families of the victims. She borrowed a black scarf which – in solidarity with the victims – she wrapped over her head, covering her hair. She was photographed through a window meeting community members, with “my hands clasped, eyes fixed ahead”.
She writes: “But because the photo was taken from the other side of glass, it captured not only me but also the reflections of flowers, as well as trees and dapples of sunlight. Darkness and light, all mixed together in a hazy collage.” That photo, she remarks, “would be called a definitive image of my leadership, an image of hope, the face of empathy”.
She records that ten thousand weapons were handed in to the police in the first month after the law was passed”
In response to the shootings, Ardern’s government introduced stringent firearms regulations, banning military-style semiautomatic weapons and providing for an amnesty and buyback programme to compensate people for weapons that were now illegal. She records that ten thousand weapons were handed in to the police in the first month after the law was passed.
Ardern’s government had an ambitious programme to tackle New Zealand’s housing crisis, child poverty and social inequality generally – but all that was ultimately derailed by the Covid pandemic. Ardern describes Covid as “a tough ordeal for everyone, a complete upending of our experience of the world”.
Her immediate response to the pandemic was to close New Zealand’s borders to all noncitizens, and shortly afterwards to introduce a nationwide lockdown. She kept a strict regime of restrictions in place for eighteen months and prevented Covid taking hold before vaccines could be rolled out. New Zealand was thus spared the tsunami of deaths that Covid would wreak elsewhere. Initially she enjoyed wide public support for her efforts.
Togetherness
By end-2021, however, she recognised that “New Zealand’s sense of togetherness had started to fracture. Many were weary of the constant interruptions of life and were getting angry.”
That anger led to a twenty-three-day occupation of the forecourt of the New Zealand parliament building, ostensibly in protest against vaccine mandates – but Ardern judges that “for some it was about more than that. It was about trust, or more accurately mistrust.
“What manifested itself at the occupation was also bigger than New Zealand. It was a challenge the world over – people now couldn’t even agree on what was fact and what was fiction.” It was the same spirit that fuels the MAGA and other right-wing populist movements.
Ardern shocked the world by suddenly resigning as prime minister in January 2023. She was facing likely defeat in the general election due later that year, but she seems simply to have lost the will to continue in office. She famously said that she “didn’t have enough in the tank” to go on.
It was a sad end to a premiership that had begun with so much promise, but her own summing up of her career in the closing pages of her memoir is fair: “I had not been everyone’s first image of a leader … But I had been a leader. And I had done it on my own terms.”