KIWI ‘TRUDEAUMANIA’
Jacinda Ardern has upended politics in New Zealand,
WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND— No one had expected New Zealand’s Sept. 23 election to be much of a contest. The conservatives were expected to win, again.
But that was before Jacinda Ardern and a wave of support that’s now called “Jacindamania.”
The selection of Ardern as the Labour Party’s leader on Aug.1-elevated a 37-yearold woman without the traditional setup of a husband or children to the head of a national party, and this country’s politics have not been the same since.
She is Labour’s youngest leader ever, as at home on social media as she is in policy debates. And she has already attracted global attention for condemning a television commentator’s question about whether employers have a right to know whether a woman plans to become a parent.
“That is unacceptable in 2017,” she told him. “It is the woman’s decision about when they choose to have children.”
Her main achievement, however, may be disrupting an election that had been seen as a surefire win for the conservative National Party.
One recent poll showed Labour slightly ahead. Since Ardern’s rise, the party’s projected share of the vote has jumped by around 20 points.
“In the last two elections, it’s been relatively clear that the governing party would be the National Party,” said Andrew Geddis, a professor at the law school of the University of Otago. Now, he added, “we might finally have a real election.”
A rising star in Labour since joining Parliament in 2008 as its youngest sitting member, Ardern is unconventional, accessible and ambitious.
In an interview, she answered questions carefully but also joked about the stress of her new position. The number of days until the election, she said, is written in her diary “like a horrific countdown to Armageddon.”
On Twitter, she has 80,000 followers, more than anyone else in the country’s Parliament. She once performed as a DJ at a music festival. Her most scandalous moment in public life so far involved her attempt to install her own bathroom rather than hiring a professional to do it, drawing disapproval from a national plumbers’ board.
Her colleagues describe her as intensely focused. She grew up as a Mormon in a rural town working part-time jobs and earned a degree in communications from the University of Waikato. She worked her way up the Labour Party ranks, and along the way, she said, she discovered a passion for child welfare and economic equality.
Grant Robertson, the party’s finance spokesperson and a close friend, recalled sharing a small office with Ardern in 2005 when they were both advisers to Helen Clark, the prime minister at the time who was the country’s first elected female leader.
Ardern was “unflappable,” Robertson said. “She was a person that took seriously everything she did in her working life, and I didn’t get a sense she was there to aim for a particular position. She was just doing the job that had been put in front of her.”
In March, she was elected deputy to the Labour Party’s leader, Andrew Little. But after polls showed the party was set to fail with Little at the helm, he made a surprise move: he stepped aside and named Ardern as his replacement.
When Ardern found out about the resignation, she was in a car on the way from the airport. An hour later, she officially had the top spot.
There was so little time to transition that she had to “get on with it,” she said.
It seems to be working. Labour and the National Party are statistically even in the polls.
Some political experts question whether Ardern has the experience needed. She has spent her career in the opposition and has not championed a bill in Parliament.
“The question will be whether she can add the substance and steel that New Zealanders may look for in a leader of their country,” Geddis said.
Ardern said that she relishes the challenge. “I’m actually enjoying the chance to demonstrate that I have in my heart and always will be a policy wonk,” she said.
Her campaign website includes indepth proposals for free university education and a call for longer limitations on rent increases, among other things.
Ardern is no stranger to the focus on her appearance and gender; once a panellist referred to her as “a pretty little thing.”
Only a day into her leadership, a television commentator argued that employers had the right to ask women about their child-bearing plans, prompting her steely response, which was applauded by women around the world.
Ardern has decided to speak openly — she often talks about her long-term partner, Clarke Gayford, who hosts a travel and fishing TV show — because she thought it might help other women juggling decisions about their career and because she believes that people want to get to know their representatives.
“They want to know a bit about them — what kind of humans they are, what kind of values they have,” she said.
And in New Zealand, she added, even the nation’s most powerful figures are expected to be down to earth. She said that people felt comfortable approaching her about the country’s politics, even while she was shopping for groceries.
“I can tell you a number of times where I’ve been standing in the aisle looking at rows of muesli bar boxes and people have come up to give me their opinion or to ask for help,” she said. “And that’s just the way it is here.”