In an era dominated by conservative machismo,Ardern stood apart as a striking alternative:a young,female and unashamedly progressive world leader. In,she was “the world’s anti-Trump”.
Elected at 37,Ardern was something of an accidental prime minister. The centre-right National Party won the most seats at the 2017 election,but Ardern’s Labour Party formed power thanks to support from the far-right and far-left. She was – in the alleged words of Paul Keating – at the arse end of the Earth,running a minority government in a nation of just five million people.
Yet Ardern,,became a hero to left-leaning women around the world,turning New Zealand,of all places,into a source of global political fascination.TIME magazine;The Atlantic.
She vowed to tackle climate change,child poverty and homelessness. As other world leaders turned inwards,she stressed the importance of multilateralism.
In a 2018 speech to the United Nations she extolled the importance of kindness. That same year she became the first elected world leader to take maternity leave while in office,pausing for At least in New Zealand,it seemed politics was belatedly catching up to the realities of modern family life.
The times weren’t easy,but they suited her. “She has faced more crises than any other New Zealand prime minister since the Second World War,” says Richard Shaw,an expert in politics at New Zealand’s Massey University.
Shaw says Ardern’s tenure will be defined by her response to two particular crises:the 2019 Christchurch massacre and the COVID-19 pandemic.
When an Australian gunman shot dead 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, while meeting with members of the city’s Muslim community. She took swift action to toughen the nation’s gun laws,including by banning military-style semi-automatic weapons,and to pull down extremist content. “She was calm,she was compassionate,she was dignified,” Shaw says.
,closing the country’s borders and shutting down the economy. In the first year of the pandemic,New Zealand went 102 days without any community transmission and recorded one of the world’s lowest death rates. As with Australian state premiers who pursued similar “COVID zero” policies,Kiwi voters rewarded Ardern with a landslide victory in the 2020 election.
The reality of Ardern’s prime ministership was more flawed than the international hype suggested. A plan to create more affordable housing,called KiwiBuild,was scrapped after two years because it wasn’t building homes fast enough. as COVID death numbers soared,inflation spiked and concerns about crime increased. Rather than face a potential election defeat this year,she’s called it quits.
The legacy of her leadership style,however,will live on. Ardern showed that encouraging empathy could be as politically powerful as stoking division,in the process lifting New Zealand’s status on the world stage to unprecedented heights.
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