Jacinda Ardern: Ordinary Woman, Extraordinary Leader

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern
Tufts University, April 2024 (Photo: Alonso Nichols, Tufts Now)

As someone who studies and reads a lot of books and articles about political leaders, I have come to identify certain traits that are essential to positive and uplifting leadership. These include intelligence, wisdom, empathy, courage, the ability to listen to different points of view, understand people’s needs, acknowledge uncertainty, respect science and not be afraid to consult with experts, and prioritize the public interest over political advancement. In an ideal world, the best leaders also inspire kindness and decency in others. Although few people in history fit all these criteria, I believe that a genuinely compassionate and intelligent leader can govern a nation with kindness, empathy, and honesty while protecting the country’s interests and functioning as a trusted neighbor in the world community.

We live in a world dominated by oligarchs and strongmen. In the United States, we have a president who celebrates UFC fights and aggressive masculinity, demeans reporters, especially female reporters, and laces every speech and interview with insults and name calling. Our Secretary of Defense preaches that elevated levels of testosterone are the true measure of a man and essential to a warrior ethos while he systematically eliminates women from positions of senior leadership. From Russia and North Korea to dozens of countries in both hemispheres, political leaders frequently exemplify the worst traits of humanity.

Jacinda Ardern was a different kind of leader. As Prime Minister of New Zealand from 2017 to 2023, she proved that an effective leader need not sacrifice her humanity. Her honest, humane, and compassionate governing style was frequently described as an “antidote to Trumpism” and her popularity around the world reflected the sentiment. She was living proof that a head of state can be empathetic, sensitive, kind, and still be strong enough to lead a great nation with a proud history.

Recently, I finished A Different Kind of Power (Crown Publishing House, 2025), Jacinda Ardern’s refreshing and candid memoir about overcoming insecurities and self-imposed feelings of “imposter syndrome” to become the third woman to serve as Prime Minister of New Zealand. Ardern was only 37 when she became prime minister, the youngest person ever to hold the country’s highest seat of power. Her memoir, and the excellent CNN documentary “Prime Minister” released a few months later, depicts an ordinary, unassuming woman who became a consequential and highly effective national leader in difficult and challenging times. I came away from both with a sense of hope, for they confirmed my belief that kindness, decency, and compassion truly can make a difference in leadership at the highest levels of government.

A key ingredient of Ardern’s popularity and effectiveness as prime minister was her authenticity. She is extremely relatable. The daughter of a police officer, she learned at an early age that the ability to communicate, to use words effectively, was essential to establishing public trust. In New Zealand, police officers do not routinely carry guns. They are considered citizens in uniforms whose authority derives from the consent and cooperation of the community. As a young girl, she once saw her dad in uniform surrounded by a hostile group of men in leather jackets. As she walked across the parking lot, her father noticed her approaching. “Keep walking, Jacinda,” he said in a calm voice. Although she did as told, she worried about his safety. Later that night, her dad explained, “Jacinda, my words will always be the greatest tool I have.” It was a valuable lesson to her, and one she would use in later years.

As someone who grew up in a Mormon household, she valued its keen sense of community and understood from a young age how much personal connection mattered to people. Through its missionary work, she became comfortable with striking up conversations with people she did not know. Although she would later move away from her Mormon faith when it increasingly conflicted with her personal values, especially concerning the rights of women and LGBTQ persons, she always respected how loving and kind the people in her church were, and how focused they remained on service and charity.

Ardern developed an early interest in public policy and debate but never imagined herself capable or tough enough to run for public office. “I was the worker who quietly and steadily got things done,” she writes. “My elbows weren’t sharp enough; my skin was too thin. I was idealistic and sensitive.” And yet, she had witnessed two women become Prime Minister of New Zealand and the thought never crossed her mind that her gender would preclude her from becoming involved in politics. When she interned for a Labour Party MP during college, she fell in love with it. Parliament “was a place where laws changed and problems were fixed,” she recounted. Politics, when done right, could change the lives of hundreds of thousands of people for the better. And it could address issues that mattered to her, like poverty and inequality, climate change, repairing past injustices to indigenous populations, and advancing women’s reproductive freedoms.

When Ardern first became a Member of Parliament on the Labour Party ticket in 2008, however, she experienced a crisis of confidence when the opposition verbally attacked her during a hard-edged debate on the Parliament floor. She figured the only way to cope was to toughen up, to develop thick skin and roll with the punches, so she sought the advice of a fellow Labour MP, a veteran politician known for his hardcore tactics. “Promise me you won’t try to toughen up, Jacinda,” he advised. “You feel things because you have empathy, and because you care. The moment you change is the moment you’ll stop being good at your job.”

Ardern resolved to remain true to herself. When she talked with groups of students, Ardern frequently asked them to describe what they think leadership requires. The students consistently used words such as “angry” and “aggressive.” Ardern would never be that kind of politician. “I didn’t want to choose between being a good politician and being what I considered a good person.” And she learned from exchanges with certain members of the opposition that “it was possible to disagree with your opponent without getting personal.” 

It turned out that Ardern’s empathetic style indeed was an effective way to lead and govern. In March 2017, the Labour Party selected Ardern as its deputy leader. She shared Labour’s vision “that our country be a place where everyone has a roof over their head and meaningful work, where education is free, where children live surrounded by creativity, not poverty, where we lead the world on environmental issues” and build a country “even better than the way we found it.”

Five months later, she was unexpectedly thrust into the leadership role when Prime Minister Andrew Little resigned following Labour’s poor showing in the polls. With national elections coming, Ardern ran a campaign of positivity and Labour’s popularity rebounded. In October 2017, when the New Zealand First Party agreed to a coalition with Labour, Ardern became New Zealand’s third female prime minister.

Only days before, unbeknownst to the public, Ardern discovered she was pregnant. Her daughter Neve was born eight months later. Although she was criticized for being selfish, for trying to have it all, she showed that, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, “the job of looking after a country’s people — and the mix of love and steel required to personally care for a child — might just go hand in hand.”

Before her swearing in, a journalist who Ardern had respected since she was eleven years old, asked her, “What is it you want to do?” She said what immediately came to mind. “I want this government to feel different. I want people to feel that it’s open, that it’s listening, and that it’s going to bring kindness back.” In her memoir, Ardern explained further:

Some people thought kindness was sentimental, soft. A bit naïve, even. I knew this. But I also knew they were wrong. Kindness has a power and strength that almost nothing else on this planet has. I’d seen kindness do extraordinary things: I’d seen it give people hope; I’d seen it change minds and transform lives. I wasn’t afraid to say it aloud, and as soon as I did, I was sure: kindness. This would be my guiding principle no matter what lay ahead.

Both the CNN documentary and memoir bring to light private moments that show Ardern’s ordinary humanity as she dealt with terrible bouts of morning sickness and her struggles to breast feed her newborn while balancing the responsibilities of prime minister with her desire to be a present mother to her child. Although she received criticism when she became the first prime minister to take six weeks of maternity leave while in office, most New Zealanders supported her decision, reinforcing a fundamental truth, “that politicians are humans first, and perhaps the public hadn’t lost sight of that.”

Throughout her tenure as prime minister, she displayed top-down kindness as a thoughtful, intelligent leader determined to act when necessary. After a white supremacist carried out two mass shootings on the same day at Christchurch mosques that killed 51 people and injured 49 more, Ardern immediately responded with heartfelt empathy. She mourned and grieved with the Christchurch Muslim community. She hugged and supported them, cried and prayed with them. She made clear the entire nation condemned the attacks and supported them in their darkest hour. Although some of the Muslim victims had come to New Zealand as refugees, this was an attack on “our community,” she said. “They are New Zealanders. They are us.” She received widespread praise from the Muslim and international communities for her personally empathetic response to the shootings.

But words, hugs, and prayers were not enough. Over the next three weeks, Ardern orchestrated and led the passage of sweeping legislation that banned most semiautomatic weapons, assault rifles, and higher capacity magazines from New Zealand, a country with a high rate of gun ownership. Through an amnesty and buyback program, tens of thousands of military-style assault weapons were taken off the streets. Horrified by viral social media posts of the Christchurch shootings, she launched the Christchurch Call to Action, an international commitment to remove and eliminate violent extremist content from the internet. Her tears generated toughness. She would not compromise public safety.

Tragedy struck New Zealand again in March 2019, when a volcano erupted at Whakaari/White Island that killed twenty-two people and severely burned many more. In the following days, Ardern visited with the survivors and family members of those who died and personally thanked the first responders who risked their lives rescuing survivors. When a social media post claimed she was only visiting the community so she could be seen “hugging people,” Ardern acknowledged the criticism bothered her. But she would do nothing differently. “First of all, of course I’d gone,” she writes. “This was a major disaster in our country and I was prime minister. And criticizing me for hugging people? … I would rather be criticized than stop being human.”

Less than a year later, she would be tested in ways never anticipated. “Leadership is a test for which you can only partially prepare,” she noted. “If you’re lucky, the information you need is out there—somewhere, in some form.” But when the world first confronted COVID, there was little information to draw on. As an island nation, New Zealand had some advantages. Twenty days after its first documented cases, her government closed the nation’s borders to everyone except returning citizens and established isolation and tracing protocols. But the pandemic was moving too quickly, and if she did not take more drastic action, the data and science showed that tens of thousands of people would die. That would be catastrophic in a country of five million people. For Ardern, it was not an option.

In April 2020, Ardern’s government ordered a Level 4 lockdown, shutting down most businesses and schools as people sheltered in place. Within six weeks, New Zealand had no new COVID cases. A few weeks later, the government reduced alert levels so people could dine out again, invite neighbors into their homes, and return to the world. For the next two years, New Zealand would have long stretches of normalcy followed by occasional periods of rising alert levels. But compared to the rest of the world, life looked ordinary in New Zealand, as kids returned to school, restaurants were open, and families gathered for weddings and funerals. By the time vaccines arrived and the country had achieved a 90 percent vaccination rate, the crisis in New Zealand had been mostly avoided. While COVID raged around the world, causing millions of deaths (including over 1.2 million in the United States), New Zealand experienced only twenty-five deaths and an infection rate 80% lower than in the United States.

Ardern writes also of the threatening and ugly backlash she faced with a vocal minority of anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, fueled by disinformation from the United States. But she defends her actions to this day. “We came out of COVID with one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and fewer days in lockdown than nations like the U.K., and during this time our country’s life expectancy actually increased.” That is what leadership is all about.

New Zealand is known for “punching above its weight” on the world stage and Ardern’s diplomatic approach represented New Zealand well within the international community. Domestically, in addition to enacting major gun safety measures following the Christchurch terrorist attacks, she took decisive action on climate change, committing New Zealand to carbon neutrality by 2050. She enacted pay equity and parental leave laws. She launched a mental health initiative and a Child and Youth Wellbeing Strategy. Her government reformed the state benefits system to make it more accessible and friendly, built more state housing than any government in the last fifty years, expanded access to childhood education and health care, and invested in violence prevention programs. And for the first time in the country’s history, Parliament decriminalized abortion and advanced the cause of reproductive freedom.

But six years of nonstop work, pressure, anxiety, and crisis after crisis, finally took its toll. Ardern decided to resign from public life in 2023. She had done her best, and that was enough. As she wrote in her memoir:

[W]hen I was prime minister, I saw moments of true darkness. … But there’s an inverse feature to seeing the world at its most brutal, because those are also the moments that show people at their most humane. Those are the moments when I saw that it was possible for people to galvanize behind their collective humanity. Sometimes, those moments are small. Other times, they create a ripple that sweeps across the country.

Ardern continues to work for change and tries to make the world a little brighter. As she told a gathering at Tufts University in 2024, whatever her future holds, “I am going to talk about what it means to be human first, and a leader second, because I think we need more of that in the world.”

Jacinda Ardern is an appealing and refreshing voice in a world that increasingly turns dark and brutal. I hope that her example inspires other men and women of kindness and decency to enter politics and follow in her example. She challenged misperceptions and assumptions about young female leaders. And she proved that common sense combined with sensitivity, compassion, and empathy are towering strengths. We need a lot more leaders like her.

Seeing America Through Other Eyes

As the United States commemorates its 250^th anniversary, it seems appropriate to reflect on what America represents, to us and the world, in 2026. The document we joyously uphold this weekend declares, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These aspirational words inspired the American Revolution. We are the only nation on earth founded on an idea, an aspirational dream of liberty and equality for all. If there is anything that makes America exceptional, that is it.

That we did not live up to these aspirations for the first nearly 190 years of our young existence, however, should not take away from the ideas those words embraced. The Declaration formed the bedrock of Frederick Douglass’s famous speech on July 5, 1852, which appealed to our nation’s moral conscience and exposed the inherent hypocrisy between its founding principles and everyday governance. Abraham Lincoln used the proposition that “all men are created equal” to formally challenge the institution of slavery in America. Women did not secure the right to vote until ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. And in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked the founding ideals of equality and unalienable rights as a "promissory note" owed to Black Americans, a moral reckoning that came to fruition in his “I Have a Dream” speech four months later during the March on Washington.

Only when the long arc of the universe finally bent toward justice, with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, did our country begin to fulfill its promise of legal equality for all citizens. But the aspirational power of the words in the Declaration of Independence, what historian Jon Meacham calls “the Promise of America” in our ongoing project to secure a “more perfect Union,” is a beautiful thing worth celebrating.

America is also a nation of immigrants with a complicated past. For the vast majority of Americans whose families at one time arrived on our shores from foreign lands, we view ourselves as a land of abundant opportunity, a melting pot of diverse peoples and cultures united by a commitment to the U.S. Constitution, the rule of law, and the pursuit of happiness. Americans proudly proclaim the United States a beacon of hope and light unto the nations, a place where people from all over the world come in search of economic opportunity, personal and religious freedom, and democracy.

Although our reputation as a place of refuge and asylum from a troubled world has been under extraordinary strain for the past 18 months, it is easier to preserve the myth of our own goodness than to reflect on more complex truths. Americans are a proud people. We see ourselves as the premier force for good in the world, for modernization and progress, as the arbiters of peace who stomp out terrorism and provide a pathway to democracy and civilization. Americans have long assumed that our intentions are pure, even if our actions are sometimes imperfect.

The rest of the world has a more nuanced view. They can see more clearly the hypocrisy of what America says and what it does. We leave our footprints all over the world. With over 800 military bases spread across more than 80 countries, we are the largest foreign military presence in human history. American corporate influence spans the globe, dominating international markets, technology, and pop culture. U.S. companies shape everything from global trade and digital infrastructure to local consumer habits worldwide. For some Americans, these are the things that instill pride and render America exceptional.

But for millions of people in foreign lands, a different picture of America emerges. During a talk in New York City in 2012, Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid noted what, to most foreigners, is an obvious truth: “There’s an America that exists inside the borders of the United States, which is a very different entity from the America that projects its force outside the United States.” There are “two Americas.”

One need only look to the long, dark history of U.S. covert operations and military aggressions on behalf of autocratic rulers, dictators, and anti-democratic forces in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. “No country,” writes Hamid, “inflicts death so readily upon the inhabitants of other countries, frightens so many people as far away, as America.”  It is something that most Americans think little about. We tend to be insular people. We rarely look outward, rarely consider what other people and countries think of us. And yet, we are surprised to learn that people in other parts of the world do not always perceive us as good and generous as we view ourselves.

Rescue workers at bombing site in Minab, Iran, Feb. 28, 2026
(Photo: Abbas Zakeri/Mehr News/Reuters via The Guardian)

Journalist and author Suzy Hansen reflected on these themes nine years ago in a beautifully written book, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World. Hansen grew up in a small, provincial town on the Jersey Shore and, like most Americans, knew next to nothing about Turkey’s history, culture, and traditions when she first arrived there in 2007. But over the next ten years, through her daily interactions with the people of Turkey, and in her travels to neighboring countries, Hansen developed a deeper understanding of the countries, people, and societies in which she immersed herself.

Living in Istanbul and opening herself to the experiences and perspectives of the people she met along the way created for Hansen an “American identity crisis.” Not because she doubted her inherent Americanness, her love of country and connection to her homeland, but because she re-discovered America through the eyes of the people she encountered in these foreign lands. She felt compelled to re-consider her long-held assumptions and ask why these foreigners knew so much more about her country than she did of theirs, and why she knew so little about how profoundly America had impacted, not always for good, this region of the world.

Hansen recalled one conversation she had with an Iraqi man at a café in 2012. “Over the course of our conversation I asked him what Iraq was like in the 1980s and 1990s, when he was growing up. He smiled. ‘I am always amazed when Americans ask me this,’ he said. ‘How is it that you know nothing about us when you had so much to do with what became of our lives?’”

The Iraqi man had seen how U.S. support for Saddam Hussein in the 1980s prolonged the brutal Iraq-Iran war that resulted in roughly one million casualties. He saw U.S. bombs nearly destroy Baghdad in 1991, killing thousands of Iraqi civilians. In 2003, he saw the U.S. invasion of Iraq severely destabilize the country and result in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, a deadly, prolonged sectarian civil war, an extensive and costly military occupation, and the rise of extremist groups like ISIS. And all Iraqis despised the U.S. imposed sanctions from 1990 to 2003, which as described by Hansen “destroyed the livelihoods of men and families, plunged people into poverty, and caused as many as five hundred thousand children to die. (About which Madeleine Albright—today a feminist icon—once said, ‘We think the price is worth it.’)” Hansen offered this additional assessment:

If as an American I merely ignored, was not incensed or heartbroken by American actions like sanctions, then it must have been because I somehow believed that those Iraqis were deserving of sanctions. What this does in the end is create a distance between myself and those foreigners I thought deserving of sanctions. It is one that cannot be bridged. The difference between us and them is that our country has created this universe in which sanctions are acceptable punishment for everyone except our country. It means that no other country can force my father to lose his job, or force my family to go hungry, or to break up my family, or to forever distort my future, but my country can do that to almost any other foreigner, including the man sitting across from you at a café.

At the time, most Americans perceived sanctions as a pressure-inducing tool of international diplomacy and assumed that life under Saddam Hussein was already terrible, which it was. “But what Americans likely didn’t know was that the Iraqi government had for a long time provided its people with adequate health care, schools, and social programs.” In the 1980s, Baghdad University had more female professors than did Princeton as late as 2009. Literacy in Iraq was at ninety percent. As Hansen explained:

While the Americans were promising a fantasy version of American life—all freedom and democracy—Iraqis likely envisioned a better version of Iraqi life, one rooted in history and reality. Americans never grasped that Iraqis might have their own idea of what a good life would entail. In the first days of the American occupation [post-2003]—and what would turn out to be the next decade—Iraqis were bewildered that the United States could not even provide them with electricity … In 1991, after the first Gulf War, Saddam got the lights back up within months.

Hansen had many such conversations with friends and acquaintances during her years overseas. The Iranians with whom Hansen spoke in her travels had never forgotten how the United States helped orchestrate the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1951, followed by U.S. support for the Shah and the CIA’s role in training agents of SAVAK, the brutal secret police service known for its severe torture techniques and violence against Iranian citizens and dissidents. Indeed, for most Iranians, “all the tensions that define the relations between United States and Iran today are rooted in the fall of Mossadegh.”

The Shah was a friend of the United States because we viewed him as Western-minded and a strong leader who supported “modernization” and was our ally in the Cold War. But to many Iranians, “modernity” meant American businesses profiting at Iranians’ expense in their country, the U.S. providing weapons to a brutal dictator, extensive poverty, and the terror of SAVAK. “Yet to this day,” as Hansen explained, “when a journalist like myself arrives in a foreign country, modernity is the measurement through which all standards of ‘success’ or goodness are judged, and the rejection of modernity by men such as the Iranian ayatollahs … is reviled as barbarism and backwardness, with complete disconnection from what modernization projects actually meant to that country’s hapless people.”

Hansen quotes Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, who has written about how the West has failed to understand the sense of “humiliation” it has repeatedly inflicted on Muslim men. “The real challenge,” according to Pamuk, “is to understand the spiritual lives of the poor, humiliated, discredited people who have been excluded from its fellowship.” What drives many of these men “is not Islam or this idiocy people call the war between East and West, nor is it poverty; it is the impotence born of a constant humiliation, of a failure to make oneself understood, to have one’s voice heard.”

Even in Turkey, a “pro-business” and “moderate” Islamic country that has embraced and adopted much of the West’s notions of modernity while avoiding colonialism, the people’s lives have been substantially affected by American actions and policies. One of Hansen’s closest Turkish friends was a woman named Rana, who said that America had defined much of her life in Turkey. As Hansen explained:

For someone like Rana, America defined her life in the broadest terms; it was an American world, with American-made international laws, American wars on her borders, American military bases on her country’s soil, American movies in her movie theaters, American songs on the radio, American monetary exchange rates, American economic policies … and four whole pages devoted to American news in the Turkish newspapers. As we spoke, I could see that foreigners grew up without the very thing that Americans cherished so much about their American selves—their self-made story.

Regardless of how one may judge the successes and failures of American foreign policy, the perspectives conveyed by Hansen offer important considerations and painful truths. Hansen did not intend Notes on a Foreign Country to be an authoritative history of the countries discussed, and there are important countervailing narratives she overlooks or ignores. Written as part memoir, and fused with historical insight and background, Hansen’s writing questions American assumptions of superiority and examines the distance between what America thinks of itself and what it is to the rest of the world.

I feel extremely grateful and fortunate to have lived my whole life in the United States. But I found Hansen's book educational and eye opening because we are a country frequently unwilling to see the world from an unfiltered, non-American lens. It helped me understand more clearly why U.S. assertions of economic and military power rarely end well for the countries involved, and why U.S. knowledge and expertise often fall short in foreign lands.

From American interventions in Vietnam to the Middle East to Latin America, the United States too often asserts its power in countries and cultures we know little about and then makes things worse in the countries it disrupts. Despite our affluence, success, rich democratic traditions, and history, we have a lot to learn from other people, nations, and cultures.

So, as we proudly and joyously celebrate America’s 250th birthday, let us commit to our ongoing quest to achieve a “more Perfect union” and the promise that is America. But let us also recognize that, as strong and powerful and successful as the American experiment has become, we are not alone in this world. We are not superior or exceptional to anyone. And we should consider how our actions and policies may negatively impact people who strive, like all Americans, for a life dedicated to the pursuit of happiness and equality and justice for all.