One of the hardest things in life is knowing when to stop. So it is testament to Jacinda Ardern’s enduring skills that she has made it look almost easy. New Zealand’s prime minister announced her resignation this week in an emotional but characteristically graceful speech, declaring that after five and half gruelling years at the top she no longer had “enough in the tank to do it justice”.
She was quitting, she said, not because the job was too hard but because she believed leadership was about giving it everything you’ve got for as long as possible, but recognising when your time is up. And so Ardern becomes that rarest of unicorns, a politician with the emotional intelligence to jump instead of waiting to be pushed.
Compare and contrast with Boris Johnson scrabbling around in the dirt last summer, clinging so stubbornly to his irrevocably stained premiership that even when he finally and grudgingly resigned, some wondered aloud if he really meant it. Think of Donald Trump and his towering ego, so incapable of accepting the democratic verdict of the people that he whipped up a mob to storm the Capitol. Few political or business leaders take things to quite such extremes, of course. But in all walks of life, it’s common for alpha types whose grip is slipping to respond by clinging on even tighter, convincing themselves they can still somehow turn things around. They double down, dig in and refuse to accept what everyone else can see; they lurch from one shabby deal to another in an increasingly undignified effort to survive. Sometimes, they hang on just long enough to ensure that the end, when it comes, will be brutal and rancorous, a source of bitter recriminations for years to come.
The same can be true of couples who cling on to a dead relationship long after they should arguably have called it quits, and who hate each other so passionately by the time they eventually walk away that a civilised divorce has become impossible. Personally speaking, having walked away once from an all-consuming job I loved because at the time it seemed incompatible with actually having a life, I suspect Ardern won’t regret moving on. There can be strength, rather than weakness, in knowing when it’s time to let go. Whatever you think of Ardern’s particular progressive brand of politics, to quit while the world is still wanting more feels inescapably like a power move.
To say that she is going out on a high would admittedly be pushing it, given that last month she recorded her worst approval ratings domestically since becoming leader in 2017. Like everyone else, New Zealanders are feeling the inflationary pinch, and polls suggest that her party will struggle in this year’s general election.
It’s a far cry from the early stages of the pandemic, when Ardern was feted at home and abroad for her boldness and decisiveness in pursuing a strict zero-Covid policy that kept her country’s death toll enviably low. She caught the millennial mood with her unifying response to a terror attack in Christchurch and, with her appeal to New Zealanders to “be strong, and be kind” as they faced the Covid storm, she became the standard bearer for a gentler, more empathic model of leadership. Progressives around the world were drawn, too, to her experiments in building economic policy around the pursuit of happiness and a better quality of life, rather than growth at all costs.
But as other countries started opening up post-Covid while New Zealand did not, the domestic mood turned mutinous. Rising crime, a persistent housing crisis and a series of angry anti-vaxxer protests that culminated in violent clashes outside the country’s parliament all took their toll. By bowing out now, she is perhaps recognising not only that she has exhausted her own reserves but that her party’s best chance of retaining power this autumn may be under a leader free from the painful baggage she had accumulated over the last few years.
Would a man have had the self-awareness or humility to step aside? It’s a complex question to answer, given that Margaret Thatcher fought ferociously to the end. But to walk away from power at this level requires a refreshing lack of ego, and it is perhaps telling that the closest British parallels are with the New Labour minister Estelle Morris’s startling decision 20 years ago to resign as education secretary, on the grounds that she didn’t think she was effective enough, and with speculation that Nicola Sturgeon may choose not to lead the Scottish National party into the next election.
However gracefully it may be executed, there’s nonetheless something faintly uneasy about celebrating a woman’s exit when it follows the kind of misogynistic abuse and threats Ardern has faced for so long. As only the second ever female leader to give birth in office, she was a role model for some and a target for others, fending off endless sniping about how she would cope in office with morning sickness or maternity leave.
The deal she did with her partner Clarke Gayford, who stayed at home initially to look after their daughter, is one that powerful men have done with their wives since time immemorial, but it’s also one for which women are more harshly judged. If Ardern has felt painfully torn at times – and it’s a rare mother in a demanding job who doesn’t – then she didn’t spell that out in her leaving speech. But there was an unmistakable poignancy to the moment at the end when she spoke directly to her daughter, Neve, saying she was “looking forward to being there when you start school this year”.
It can’t have been easy, but Ardern can take pride in being one of those rare figures who genuinely shifts the needle. She wanted to show that there was a different way to lead, and she did so; at the height of her powers she made the world sit up and watch. Now those powers are unmistakably fading, but she has found a way of making that look less like a failure than the unfolding of a natural process. To everything there is a season, and Ardern is saying that hers is passing.
At 42, she’s still arguably young enough to hunker down for a bit and then attempt a return to frontline politics. But is that what she really wants? Her resignation speech sounded more like a recognition that leadership is by definition a finite process; that power is a series of impossibly tough choices, each of which inevitably involves burning some capital, until eventually there’s simply no more match to burn. Or to put it another way, all political careers ultimately end in failure. Ardern’s triumph, by taking matters into her own hands, is to reframe her departure as simply a different form of success.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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