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https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/may/31/jacinda-ardern-kind-leadership-public-rage-life-trump-america>
"In 2022, a few months before she quit as prime minister of New Zealand,
Jacinda Ardern was standing at the sink in the toilets in Auckland airport,
washing her hands, when a woman came up to her and leaned in. She was so close
that Ardern could feel the heat from her skin. “I just wanted to say thank
you,” the woman said. “Thanks for ruining the country.” She turned and left,
leaving Ardern “standing there as if I were a high-schooler who’d just been
razed”.
The incident was deeply shocking. Ardern had been re-elected in a historic
landslide two years before. She enjoyed conversation and debate; she liked
being the kind of leader who wasn’t sealed off from the rest of the population.
But this, says Ardern, “felt like something new. It was the tenor of the
woman’s voice, the way she’d stood so close, the way her seething, nonspecific
rage felt not only unpredictable but incongruous to the situation … What was
happening?”
The incident came at a pivotal moment: Ardern sensed that the tide was turning
against her and she was grappling with whether to go. “Something had been
loosened worldwide,” she says, with rage everywhere, public servants being
followed and attacked, as if they were “somehow distinct from being human”. We
all recognise this rage, but Ardern was at the centre of it, representing
progressive politics, tough Covid measures, empathy, emotion, anti-racism,
femaleness; a symbol of a different time, more rational, kinder, when rules
still meant something. When there were many female leaders – Angela Merkel,
Theresa May, Sanna Marin, Mia Mottley, Mette Frederiksen, Tsai Ing-wen.
For all these reasons, Ardern is now missed by progressives, at home and
abroad. At her height she had blazed a global trail, modelling a different way
of doing politics – wearing a headscarf and embracing weeping bereaved families
after the Christchurch mosque massacre, then reforming gun laws in 10 days;
taking decisive action on Covid that meant New Zealanders were able to party
again while the rest of the world could barely go out; leaving celebrities from
Elton John to Stephen Colbert starry-eyed with her poise and wit and humanity.
It was Jacinda-mania, and everybody wanted a prime minister like her: young
(elected at just 37) and a woman, she offered a different vision of national
identity for New Zealand – straightforward, compassionate, diverse, globally
desirable – and a different way to lead a country – youthful, human, decent.
She had a hunky feminist boyfriend and was pregnant when she became PM; and she
was going “to bring kindness back”.
And then, out of the blue, after six years in office, in January 2023, she
dramatically announced her resignation. How could she have done this to us, her
fans wailed, at a time when the world is falling apart before our eyes?
We meet to discuss her memoir,
A Different Kind of Power, for the first major
interview she has given since she resigned. Ardern chooses the cafe, a
cavernous bare-boards-and-metal type of place, in a small mall in Cambridge,
Massachusetts – she is leading a course in empathetic leadership at Harvard. I
arrive very early, to get my equipment ready, but Ardern is already there,
drinking a huge black tea and primed with her own recording device. “Girly
swot,” I joke, using a line she has used about herself. “Ah well,” she laughs,
“why hide who you are?”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
