Jacinda Ardern’s Next Big Test
HISTORY CAME FAST AT JACINDA ARdern. Just a few years ago, in 2017, having been a local Member of Parliament for a matter of months, she became a Hail Mary candidate for Prime Minister, a millennial woman thrown into an election at the last minute to resurrect the fortunes of her slumping party in a Pacific Island nation of 4.8 million people. With a mere seven weeks left in the campaign, she put together enough votes and allies to form a government. She officially became her country’s leader around the same time she learned she was pregnant with her first child. In the past year, she has been confronted with a mass shooting committed by a far-right extremist, a suddenly active and deadly volcano and, most recently, a global virus that originated in her nation’s most important trading partner.
Nearly any of those would have been enough to capsize an experienced captain with a crack crew of advisers, let alone a rookie with an untested team whose platform was built on kindness, acceptance and inclusion. But Ardern’s deft and quietly revolutionary management of these crises, especially the Christchurch shootings, got noticed around the globe. Her gender and youth (she’s 39) were always going to make her stand out in a field dominated mainly by old gray men. Those attributes, however, are just the wrapping. Ardern’s real gift is her ability to articulate a form of leadership that embodies strength and sanity, while also pushing an agenda of compassion and community—or, as she would put it, “pragmatic idealism.”
Her response to the events of the past 12 months has propelled her to the kind of global prominence none of her predecessors enjoyed while in office. She has been named one of the most powerful women internationally, mentioned in connection with a Nobel Peace Prize and profiled in glossy media around the world. “Wherever I go,” says the actor Sam Neill, another of New Zealand’s more globally celebrated human resources, “people say, ‘You think we could have Jacinda this week? Could we just borrow her for a while?’”
Now her challenge is to prove this new style of leadership can get meaningful results, ahead of general elections in September. In other countries, voters have been drawn to strongmen and salesmen, wooed by the promise of simple answers to complex questions. People have lost trust in
