Why Did New Zealand Turn on Jacinda Ardern?
In 2022, Jacinda Ardern, the then Prime Minister of New Zealand, was approached by a stranger in an airport bathroom. Ardern was alone, washing her hands, when a middle-aged woman walked up to her at the sink. She stood uncomfortably close, Ardern recalls in her new memoir, “A Different Kind of Power”—“so close I could feel her heat against my cheek.” “I just wanted to say thank you,” the woman told her, with what Ardern describes as a “seething, non-specific rage.” “Thank you for ruining the country.”
Outside New Zealand, Ardern is regarded very differently, as a liberal paragon among world leaders. During President Donald Trump’s first term, she rocketed to international popularity as his refreshingly humane antithesis. Ardern took office in 2017, at the age of thirty-seven, and soon afterward announced that she was pregnant. The following year, she brought her three-month-old daughter along to a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. In 2019, following a terrorist attack on a Christchurch mosque, she donned a head scarf to grieve with survivors and pushed through a ban on semi-automatic weapons. Yet it was the pandemic that crystallized an image of Ardern’s New Zealand as a quasi-fantastical place—the land that toxic populism forgot.
In March, 2020, Ardern made the radical decision to pursue a strategy of eliminating COVID-19 by closing the border to visitors and briefly enacting one of the strictest lockdowns in the world. For the better part of a year, New Zealand had zero new COVID cases outside quarantine facilities, and a death count in the double digits. There were kids in classrooms and concerts in stadiums and no masks in sight. Ardern cruised to a second term in late 2020, with polling showing that she was the country’s most popular leader in a century.
By the time the border reopened, in mid-2022, the population was ninety per cent vaccinated. Research has found that the country’s aggressive approach to COVID resulted in a death rate eighty per cent lower than that of the United States, saving as many as twenty thousand lives. “Her country is better off because of her remarkable leadership,” Barack Obama declared when Ardern resigned, in early 2023, attributing her departure to burnout.
Soon after Ardern left office, her party sustained an election loss described as a “bloodbath.” New Zealand is now led by a conservative coalition whose first Deputy Prime Minister, Winston Peters, secured his position by appealing to anti-vaxxers and has compared Ardern’s government with Nazi Germany’s. Ardern herself has spent the past two years living in the United States, having become so polarizing that she has virtually vanished from public life in her home country.
The tale of what it was like for Ardern to go from being adored to being reviled so quickly would have made for an unmissable book. That’s not the story she wanted to tell. “A Different Kind of Power” is her manifesto for a kinder, less cynical form of political leadership, with her own life story as evidence that such a thing is possible.
Almost half of Ardern’s memoir covers the period before she entered Parliament. She writes frankly of her struggle to reconcile her Mormon faith with the Church’s stance on homosexuality. For a while, she tried to inhabit two worlds, before leaving the Church in her early twenties. By then, she was working as a political adviser in Wellington and was already a rising talent in the Labour Party. She had to be persuaded to seek a seat in Parliament, in 2008, sure that she was too sensitive—or just not good enough—for national politics. Almost a decade later, seven weeks before the 2017 election, with Labour facing virtual annihilation, Ardern was thrust into leadership in an act of desperation. Her vow to govern with “relentless positivity” set off an outpouring of “Jacindamania.” On the campaign trail, she writes, so many people came up to hug her that she felt as if she were “in a near-constant embrace.”
The chapters on her years as Prime Minister are compressed into a straightforward recounting of events. The personal details are disarming (during her swearing-in ceremony, she almost vomited from morning sickness on live television) but not especially revealing. In two chapters on the pandemic, she describes her struggle to be emotionally present with her daughter while her mind was consumed by the crisis, but she gives very little insight into how key decisions were made or how she thinks about those choices now. As a result, the book doesn’t come close to explaining her country’s confounding transformation during the two years it was sealed off from the outside world, suspended in an increasingly claustrophobic COVID bubble.
New Zealand’s government initially intended to take the same approach to COVID that most countries did—using restrictions to slow, but not stop, the spread of infection and avoid overwhelming hospitals. Then, in mid-March, Ardern’s science adviser arrived in her office with an alarming graph. Modellers had determined that even if the country suppressed the virus, its underfunded health system (which had fewer than three hundred I.C.U. beds) would never be able to cope with the estimated cases—a hundred thousand. “This graph was telling me that there was no way to make COVID small,” Ardern writes. “It was going to be huge, or we’d have to try to make it almost nothing at all.”
Her team hastily designed a sliding-scale lockdown system. On March 23rd, Ardern announced the implementation of the strictest setting, Level 4. People had forty-eight hours to form a bubble and stay there. Apart from exercise within your own neighborhood, no travel was permitted. The supermarket was the only place to buy groceries; rules would be enforced by police. Ardern laid out the logic for the country’s “team of five million”: this would only work if everyone participated. “It felt as if I were taking New Zealand into battle,” she recalls.
The country’s remoteness was a significant advantage in its quest to stamp out the virus, but so was a remarkable social cohesion that eluded most Western nations. Every day at 1 P.M., upward of a third of the population tuned into briefings with Ardern and Ashley Bloomfield, New Zealand’s equivalent of Anthony Fauci. In the evenings, Ardern often logged on to Facebook Live to give updates or answer questions, sitting on her bed in a casual sweater. (The chats felt like “being tucked into bed at night by my mum,” one commenter remarked.) The government housed the homeless in motels, provided wage subsidies to businesses, and dispatched internet modems to assist with at-home learning. The lockdown had bipartisan support in Parliament and was almost universally popular with the public, who enthusiastically snitched on violators to authorities.
After an initial rise, case numbers started falling, and thirty-three days in the government began easing restrictions. In June, the country entered Level 1. The border remained closed to everyone except returning citizens and permanent residents, but otherwise life essentially returned to normal.
New Zealand’s size and isolation have long been the source of great pride and great insecurity. It’s a well-worn joke that Kiwis will seize the flimsiest chance to proclaim themselves “best in the world, per capita” at pretty much anything, perpetually thirsty for outsiders to notice that their tiny nation punches above its weight. After the lockdown ended, the country was jubilant. Perhaps, some mused, the same collaborative spirit could be harnessed to tackle other intractable problems, like a severe housing crisis and corrosive inequality. Others embraced the opportunity to explore their own country while it was emptied of international tourists. And then the mood began to curdle.
The government obtained vaccines later than many other countries, largely owing to its COVID-free status. In early 2021, Kiwis enviously eyed images of vaccinated Americans and Europeans taking spring vacations in far-flung locales. Their own rollout wasn’t due to start for the general public until July. And since the government had never managed to meaningfully increase I.C.U. capacity, lockdowns remained the sole weapon against new outbreaks. When COVID escaped the quarantine system in August, 2020, and in February, 2021, brief lockdowns proved just as effective as the first. That changed with the more infectious Delta variant. After a single case was discovered in August, 2021, New Zealand went back into lockdown. For most of the country, it lasted three weeks. But in the largest city, Auckland, the lockdown dragged on for a hundred and seven days.
By then, New Zealand had been cut off from the outside world for more than a year. The quarantine system had become increasingly overloaded, with thousands separated from spouses or children or unable to visit dying relatives. The country’s pandemic response no longer appeared to be world-leading. An upside-down narrative emerged, in which New Zealanders were trapped in a mode of draconian deprivation while all sensible nations had opened up and moved on.
The Oxford Stringency Index found that New Zealand had the third-lightest restrictions among countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on average from 2022 through 2023, thanks to many months spent in Level 1. (Even in Sweden, which famously eschewed lockdowns, schools were closed and gatherings limited during that period.) New Zealand’s economy had bounced back faster than that of other developed countries for the same reason. But, perversely, the country’s success in keeping the virus out seemed to have made it hard for people to grasp the trauma and chaos they had escaped. The sentiment was captured by the country’s most influential talk-radio host, Mike Hosking, in a February, 2022, interview with Chris Hipkins, the minister for the COVID response. When Hipkins noted that New Zealand had the lowest death toll in the developed world, Hosking retorted, “Correct. But at what price?”
To speed up vaccinations, the government had imposed mandates covering forty per cent of workers. In December, 2021, the Auckland lockdown was lifted, and the country moved to a system that required digital vaccine passes to enter most indoor public places. Three-quarters of the population supported the mandates, according to polls, but they became more contentious when the unvaccinated found themselves unable to dine out with friends or get a haircut; several thousand lost their jobs because they refused to get vaccinated.
