New Zealand’s new PM is young, down-to-earth and ready
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND — When Jacinda Ardern took the podium in New Zealand’s Parliament on Thursday night, just over an hour after the startling announcement that she would be New Zealand’s next prime minister, she was smiling and assured.
Afterward, she said, she returned to her nearby studio apartment in the capital, Wellington, and “ate a pot of noodles.”
On Friday morning, she faced the news media as the prime ministerdesignate of New Zealand, 27 days after the country’s election. She is the third woman to lead the country, and, at 37, its youngest leader in more than 150 years.
“I think I’ll take time to reflect on this moment, and indeed, the campaign — when Christmas arrives,” she told Radio New Zealand.
For a woman who became leader of New Zealand’s centre-left Labour Party only 10 weeks ago, her swift ascension to leader of the country was, according to former prime minister Helen Clark, “extraordinary.”
Promising change and a “fairer deal” for marginalized New Zealanders, Ardern invigorated progressive and young voters and reversed the fortunes of the Labour Party. Its woeful position around 24 per cent in the polls helped force out the previous leader, Andrew Little, but Ardern led the party to a respectable 36.9 per cent in the election Sept. 23.
An unassuming figure, she is known for her past DJ sets and installing her own toilet — to the chagrin of New Zealand’s plumbers — but is also a confessed policy “geek” who worked for years in the New Zealand and British Labour movements and headed a socialist organization before becoming a lawmaker in 2008.
During the campaign, Ardern became an unintentional feminist hero when she batted away an interviewer’s question about whether she would have babies if she became prime minister.
In her trademark no-nonsense fashion, Clark — also the former head of the U.N. Development Program — said that Ardern had received “more than her fair share of very silly comments” during the campaign but voiced hope that New Zealanders would now “let her get on with the job” of governing.
In New Zealand, political parties must band together to form a coalition government if no party wins enough seats to govern outright. Labour did not win the most seats in the September election; that distinction went to the centre-right National Party, led by the incumbent prime minister, Bill English.
But National did not win enough to govern alone, and the decision about who would become prime minister was left to the eccentric, populist leader of a minor party, Winston Peters of New Zealand First.
Weeks of negotiations followed before Peters threw his weight behind Ardern on Thursday night. Neither she nor her rival knew Peters’ decision before he announced it on live television.
Before Ardern’s rise to leader, one student said, her vote would have gone to the further-left Green Party, which will support Labour to pass its laws.
But she had been “hooked in by Jacindamania,” she said, using the term coined by the news media.
She and other young women enthused about Ardern’s “big vision,” saying they felt empowered by her win despite critics’ saying she could not deliver on such bold ideas.