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.
