A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern A Memoir
What's it about?
A Different Kind of Power (2025) is Jacinda Ardern’s account of her time in office. It traces her path from small-town New Zealand onto the world stage and through the crises that tested her government: a terror attack, natural disasters, a pandemic, and the backlash that followed. It’s also a manifesto for a different politics – one grounded in compassion rather than toughness.
A Different Kind of Power
Politics is a strange calling: it’s draining and difficult and often ends in failure. In a famous lecture given in 1919, the German sociologist Max Weber likened it to the “strong and slow boring of hard boards.” The “vocation” for politics, he said, requires a “steadfastness of heart which can brave the crumbling of all hopes.”
Political leaders often emphasize their Weberian resolve. Nixon said politics was a contact sport, implying that getting in his way was a bruising experience. Margaret Thatcher was the Iron Lady: intransigent, implacable, immovable. American voters are regularly asked which candidate they’d rather share a foxhole with – a question that casually equates the electoral cycle with gruelling ground combat. And in Britain, power-posing party leaders outbid each other with declarations of readiness to fire nuclear missiles at hypothetical adversaries.
The association between leadership and toughness is so commonplace that we rarely stop to question it. But do we actually want – or need – politicians who swagger and strut and survey the horizon with steely-eyed certainty? Jacinda Ardern didn’t think so when she became prime minister of New Zealand in 2017 – and she still doesn’t think so after six years in office.
“Ardernism” was a different kind of power – one that emphasised kindness, humanity, honesty, and our mutual vulnerabilities and strengths. It challenged the winner-takes-all egotism and strongman style of leadership epitomised by the American president whose incumbency overlapped with Ardern’s own: Donald Trump. In this lesson, we’ll look at how Jacinda Ardern came to power, what she did with it, and what we can learn from her unusual – and often unique – style of political leadership.
Jacinda Ardern’s political career has been extraordinary. The second youngest prime minister in New Zealand’s history, she was the first to give birth in office. (Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto is the only other elected head of state in the world who can say the same.) When Ardern became leader of the Labour Party in 2017, it was on course for a historic defeat. Seven weeks later, it was in government. Most leaders are forced out by scandal or defeat; Ardern resigned voluntarily.
But nothing about her early life suggested she was destined for her country’s top job.
Born in 1980, Ardern grew up in a modest house in an unassuming town on the North Island, one of the two main islands that make up New Zealand. Her family was Mormon. Her father was a cop; her mother, a homemaker; they drove a Toyota Corona. She had an older sister and a rescue cat called Norm. Her prized possession was a green Raleigh bike.
Ardern was well-behaved: the worst you could say about her was that she called her sister a “cow” a little too often. At school, she was diligent rather than exceptional. She was sensitive, though: her parents’ quiet worries about money and the mortgage became her own, and she had persistent stomach-aches as a child because of it. Like many Mormons, the family went door to door, sharing their beliefs with neighbours. This turned out to be excellent training in polite persistence and the ability to read strangers – skills which politicians depend upon.
Ardern’s faith was shaken when she was in her mid-teens: the Almighty’s supposed benevolence was hard to square with the suicide of a friend’s brother. It collapsed entirely a few years later when she watched a movie about a gay missionary who gave up God for love.
Ardern developed a passion for debating in her final years at high school. She was good at it, too. The topics she picked – and the sides she argued – prefigured the causes she’d champion as a politician: gay rights, children’s welfare, environmentalism, and social justice. Politics, she was realising, had a profound ability to shape communities, for good and for ill. The town in which she’d grown up was a case in point. Once a bustling byword for middle New Zealand, it’d fallen into disrepair – and a kind of despair. The cause: swingeing cuts administered by a 1980s government aping Reagan’s neoliberal revolution in the United States. The deficit had been reduced, but thousands of lives had been ruined. No one, it seemed, cared about that cost.
There had to be some way of undoing that damage and improving the lot of ordinary folk. And Ardern discerned that the clearest path to that goal was politics.
When Ardern was 17, her aunt Marie – a lifelong Labour supporter – took her out to campaign for the party’s local MP. It was Ardern’s first encounter with the movement she’d one day lead. Until that moment, politics had seemed impossibly abstract. It was about big ideas and even bigger ideals – something you debated and argued over, not something you did. But up close, politics didn’t feel abstract at all. It was about choosing the right words, reading the room, handing out leaflets, and knocking on doors. It was practical; it was about people.
Ardern had found her calling.
After completing high school, she studied communications at university – a degree that might have opened doors in advertising or journalism. But that wasn’t what Ardern wanted to do. Instead, she applied for political positions. Aged 22, she landed her dream job: a research role in the office of Helen Clark, the first woman elected prime minister of New Zealand. Clark had led the Labour Party back into government after a decade in the wilderness. By hiring Ardern, she gave a future female Labour leader and prime minister her start in politics.
In 2008, aged just 28, Ardern was elected to parliament. She was New Zealand’s youngest MP and – as her critics rarely failed to notice – a woman to boot. They didn’t pull their punches: Ardern, they said, was a “show pony” whose rise had more to do with feel-good PR than political substance. Ardern quickly learned that lashing out didn’t help: it made you look humorless and thin-skinned, which was exactly what that type of misogynist wanted. The trick was to coolly deflect the jabs and jibes so the story had nowhere to go.
Ardern kept her head down and got on with the work of fine-tuning the party program, campaigning, and building trust. Fast-forward a decade and her star was starting to rise. No one was prepared for what happened next, though. This was mid-2017 – just seven weeks out from a general election. Labour’s polling was dire. Staring down the barrel of a historic wipeout, Labour leader Andrew Little resigned. With no time to lose, the party rushed to elect a successor. The winner: a relatively obscure policy wonk called Jacinda Ardern.
Cynics said she’d been set up to fail. Pundits and political insiders alike assumed that defeat was guaranteed. Ardern’s job, then, would be to take the loss with grace and hand power to a seasoned pro, for the big rebuild the party clearly needed on the other side of the election. But that wasn’t how it played out.
Those seven weeks in the lead-up to the election flew by in a breathless whirl of handshakes, hugs, and camera flashes. There were speeches and interviews – and endless questions. They ranged from the trivial – one journalist wanted to know the temperature molten glass was heated to in a factory she’d visited – to the plain insulting. When a TV interviewer asked her if she planned on taking maternity leave as a sitting prime minister, Ardern cut him off at the knees: his question, she said, was as unacceptable in a general election as it was in any other job interview.
Her answer spoke to the lived frustrations of millions of women and the clip went viral. Ardern’s appeal wasn’t limited to a single demographic, though. Calm, down-to-earth, and likeable in an everyday way politicians rarely are, she embodied what many New Zealanders like best about their country. Her emphasis on kindness, honesty, and civility reassured voters who worried that New Zealand would follow Trumpist America and Brexit Britain down the populist rabbit hole. The crowds grew larger and the polling improved. Pundits called it “Jacindamania.”
On October 26, 2017, Ardern became New Zealand’s fortieth prime minister. Unmarried, newly pregnant, and just 37 years old, she broke the mold on pretty much every front. But what she’d promised voters mattered more than who she was: a politics guided by kindness – a force, in her words, that has “a power and strength that almost nothing else on this planet has.”
They weren’t empty words. On March 15, 2019, an armed man opened fire in two mosques in New Zealand’s second largest city, Christchurch, killing 51 worshippers and injuring 80 more. In a moment of polarising – and growing – anti-immigrant and Islamophobic sentiment, Ardern embraced the victims. “They are us,” she declared as she publicly grieved with the community. Racism, she said, was a “virus” that wasn’t welcome in New Zealand. Action followed: military-style semi-automatic weapons were banned and social media companies were forced to improve their moderation policies around extremist content on their platforms.
Ardern’s response was thrown into relief by the American president, Donald Trump, who immediately questioned whether the shooting was an act of terrorism. “It was a white man from Australia who deliberately targeted our Muslim community. He is a terrorist,” Ardern told Trump over the telephone. When Trump asked her what he could do, she had a simple answer: “You can show sympathy and love for all Muslim communities.”
The spread of COVID-19 in early 2020 was a once-in-a-century event: the kind of crisis that takes even the best prepared states by surprise.
Governments were scrambling when it arrived. Some downplayed the threat; others toyed with a let-it-rip strategy designed to achieve “herd immunity.” Most committed to “flattening the curve” – slowing the spread of the disease to prevent hospital ICUs being overwhelmed. New Zealand adopted a more radical approach: eliminating COVID-19 entirely. The nation’s borders were sealed in March 2020 and one of the world’s strictest lockdowns began. By mid-June, the disease had been suppressed. An envious world looked on as maskless New Zealanders returned to schools and offices, and normal life resumed – summer music festivals included.
When the borders re-opened in mid-2022, 90 percent of the population was vaccinated. In terms of mortality, Ardern’s elimination strategy was a total triumph: with a per capita death rate 80 percent lower than the United States, it’s estimated that Ardern’s commitment to elimination saved some 20,000 lives. New Zealand, Barack Obama said, “is better off because of [Ardern’s] remarkable leadership.”
Ardern put herself at the heart of her government’s COVID-19 strategy, personally explaining the purpose of painful policies in endless interviews, livestreams, and Zoom calls. At first, her standing soared. But as the crisis wore on, the fear initially felt by New Zealanders faded. The focus shifted; frustrations mounted. Travel bans meant missed funerals, weddings, and births. Closed borders coupled with global supply chain shocks rocked the economy, triggering a vicious cost-of-living crisis. What were 20,000 lives worth? With inflation close to 10 percent, many New Zealanders said the economic crash they were experiencing was too high a cost.
After the pandemic, there was a global trend of electorates eager to resume normal life kicking incumbents out of office. The anger in New Zealand was different. Ardern’s personal touch had made her the literal face of the pandemic response. When voters came to associate that response with steep personal costs, they didn’t blame “the government” – they blamed her. She was a lightning rod. The abuse she received was extraordinary. There were calls for her to face “Nuremberg 2.0 trials.” Eight people were prosecuted for threatening to kill her. One study found that 92 percent of all abusive posts about New Zealand’s leading politicians were directed at the prime minister. It was too much – something had to give.
Ardern remembers sitting down to play with her daughter at the height of the pandemic. It’d been a long day and she was drained. “I wasn’t there,” she recalls, “not all of me.” The only thing she could think about was pandemic-related graphs.
Public office takes a toll on its holders at the best of times. Ardern’s two terms weren’t the best of times – they were studded with crises. From terrorism to COVID-19, the Ukraine war to inflation, her government was always on the back foot scrambling to respond to uncontrollable global events. Throw in an increasingly cranky opposition, trust-corroding disinformation, and threats to her own safety, and it’s easy to understand why Ardern was burned out by late 2022.
She knew it was time to step down after a brief cancer scare. When she discovered a lump, her first feeling was relief: “Perhaps I can leave.” The lump was benign, but her response showed just how worn out she was. On January 19, 2023, she announced her resignation. A privileged role, she said, comes with responsibility – the responsibility to know when you’re the right person to lead and when you’re not. “I know what this job takes,” she concluded, “and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It’s that simple.”
Ardern left office as she entered it: convinced that a kinder politics is both possible and essential. As political journalist Philip Mathews notes, there’s a line to be traced from the kid with a stomach-ache worrying about her parents to the prime minister trying to protect New Zealand from COVID-19 and the metaphorical “virus” of racism. The Jacinda Ardern story is ultimately about care. As Mathews says, that’s why her memoir is dedicated to “the criers, worriers, and huggers.”
In this lesson to A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern, you’ve learned that Jacinda Ardern’s six years in office showed that kindness and clarity can coexist with decisiveness, even in crisis. Though the toll was heavy, Ardern governed with care, proving that compassion – far from being a weakness – can be a source of strength.
A Different Kind of Power (2025) is Jacinda Ardern’s account of her time in office. It traces her path from small-town New Zealand onto the world stage and through the crises that tested her government: a terror attack, natural disasters, a pandemic, and the backlash that followed. It’s also a manifesto for a different politics – one grounded in compassion rather than toughness.
A Different Kind of Power
Politics is a strange calling: it’s draining and difficult and often ends in failure. In a famous lecture given in 1919, the German sociologist Max Weber likened it to the “strong and slow boring of hard boards.” The “vocation” for politics, he said, requires a “steadfastness of heart which can brave the crumbling of all hopes.”
Political leaders often emphasize their Weberian resolve. Nixon said politics was a contact sport, implying that getting in his way was a bruising experience. Margaret Thatcher was the Iron Lady: intransigent, implacable, immovable. American voters are regularly asked which candidate they’d rather share a foxhole with – a question that casually equates the electoral cycle with gruelling ground combat. And in Britain, power-posing party leaders outbid each other with declarations of readiness to fire nuclear missiles at hypothetical adversaries.
The association between leadership and toughness is so commonplace that we rarely stop to question it. But do we actually want – or need – politicians who swagger and strut and survey the horizon with steely-eyed certainty? Jacinda Ardern didn’t think so when she became prime minister of New Zealand in 2017 – and she still doesn’t think so after six years in office.
“Ardernism” was a different kind of power – one that emphasised kindness, humanity, honesty, and our mutual vulnerabilities and strengths. It challenged the winner-takes-all egotism and strongman style of leadership epitomised by the American president whose incumbency overlapped with Ardern’s own: Donald Trump. In this lesson, we’ll look at how Jacinda Ardern came to power, what she did with it, and what we can learn from her unusual – and often unique – style of political leadership.
Jacinda Ardern’s political career has been extraordinary. The second youngest prime minister in New Zealand’s history, she was the first to give birth in office. (Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto is the only other elected head of state in the world who can say the same.) When Ardern became leader of the Labour Party in 2017, it was on course for a historic defeat. Seven weeks later, it was in government. Most leaders are forced out by scandal or defeat; Ardern resigned voluntarily.
But nothing about her early life suggested she was destined for her country’s top job.
Born in 1980, Ardern grew up in a modest house in an unassuming town on the North Island, one of the two main islands that make up New Zealand. Her family was Mormon. Her father was a cop; her mother, a homemaker; they drove a Toyota Corona. She had an older sister and a rescue cat called Norm. Her prized possession was a green Raleigh bike.
Ardern was well-behaved: the worst you could say about her was that she called her sister a “cow” a little too often. At school, she was diligent rather than exceptional. She was sensitive, though: her parents’ quiet worries about money and the mortgage became her own, and she had persistent stomach-aches as a child because of it. Like many Mormons, the family went door to door, sharing their beliefs with neighbours. This turned out to be excellent training in polite persistence and the ability to read strangers – skills which politicians depend upon.
Ardern’s faith was shaken when she was in her mid-teens: the Almighty’s supposed benevolence was hard to square with the suicide of a friend’s brother. It collapsed entirely a few years later when she watched a movie about a gay missionary who gave up God for love.
Ardern developed a passion for debating in her final years at high school. She was good at it, too. The topics she picked – and the sides she argued – prefigured the causes she’d champion as a politician: gay rights, children’s welfare, environmentalism, and social justice. Politics, she was realising, had a profound ability to shape communities, for good and for ill. The town in which she’d grown up was a case in point. Once a bustling byword for middle New Zealand, it’d fallen into disrepair – and a kind of despair. The cause: swingeing cuts administered by a 1980s government aping Reagan’s neoliberal revolution in the United States. The deficit had been reduced, but thousands of lives had been ruined. No one, it seemed, cared about that cost.
There had to be some way of undoing that damage and improving the lot of ordinary folk. And Ardern discerned that the clearest path to that goal was politics.
When Ardern was 17, her aunt Marie – a lifelong Labour supporter – took her out to campaign for the party’s local MP. It was Ardern’s first encounter with the movement she’d one day lead. Until that moment, politics had seemed impossibly abstract. It was about big ideas and even bigger ideals – something you debated and argued over, not something you did. But up close, politics didn’t feel abstract at all. It was about choosing the right words, reading the room, handing out leaflets, and knocking on doors. It was practical; it was about people.
Ardern had found her calling.
After completing high school, she studied communications at university – a degree that might have opened doors in advertising or journalism. But that wasn’t what Ardern wanted to do. Instead, she applied for political positions. Aged 22, she landed her dream job: a research role in the office of Helen Clark, the first woman elected prime minister of New Zealand. Clark had led the Labour Party back into government after a decade in the wilderness. By hiring Ardern, she gave a future female Labour leader and prime minister her start in politics.
In 2008, aged just 28, Ardern was elected to parliament. She was New Zealand’s youngest MP and – as her critics rarely failed to notice – a woman to boot. They didn’t pull their punches: Ardern, they said, was a “show pony” whose rise had more to do with feel-good PR than political substance. Ardern quickly learned that lashing out didn’t help: it made you look humorless and thin-skinned, which was exactly what that type of misogynist wanted. The trick was to coolly deflect the jabs and jibes so the story had nowhere to go.
Ardern kept her head down and got on with the work of fine-tuning the party program, campaigning, and building trust. Fast-forward a decade and her star was starting to rise. No one was prepared for what happened next, though. This was mid-2017 – just seven weeks out from a general election. Labour’s polling was dire. Staring down the barrel of a historic wipeout, Labour leader Andrew Little resigned. With no time to lose, the party rushed to elect a successor. The winner: a relatively obscure policy wonk called Jacinda Ardern.
Cynics said she’d been set up to fail. Pundits and political insiders alike assumed that defeat was guaranteed. Ardern’s job, then, would be to take the loss with grace and hand power to a seasoned pro, for the big rebuild the party clearly needed on the other side of the election. But that wasn’t how it played out.
Those seven weeks in the lead-up to the election flew by in a breathless whirl of handshakes, hugs, and camera flashes. There were speeches and interviews – and endless questions. They ranged from the trivial – one journalist wanted to know the temperature molten glass was heated to in a factory she’d visited – to the plain insulting. When a TV interviewer asked her if she planned on taking maternity leave as a sitting prime minister, Ardern cut him off at the knees: his question, she said, was as unacceptable in a general election as it was in any other job interview.
Her answer spoke to the lived frustrations of millions of women and the clip went viral. Ardern’s appeal wasn’t limited to a single demographic, though. Calm, down-to-earth, and likeable in an everyday way politicians rarely are, she embodied what many New Zealanders like best about their country. Her emphasis on kindness, honesty, and civility reassured voters who worried that New Zealand would follow Trumpist America and Brexit Britain down the populist rabbit hole. The crowds grew larger and the polling improved. Pundits called it “Jacindamania.”
On October 26, 2017, Ardern became New Zealand’s fortieth prime minister. Unmarried, newly pregnant, and just 37 years old, she broke the mold on pretty much every front. But what she’d promised voters mattered more than who she was: a politics guided by kindness – a force, in her words, that has “a power and strength that almost nothing else on this planet has.”
They weren’t empty words. On March 15, 2019, an armed man opened fire in two mosques in New Zealand’s second largest city, Christchurch, killing 51 worshippers and injuring 80 more. In a moment of polarising – and growing – anti-immigrant and Islamophobic sentiment, Ardern embraced the victims. “They are us,” she declared as she publicly grieved with the community. Racism, she said, was a “virus” that wasn’t welcome in New Zealand. Action followed: military-style semi-automatic weapons were banned and social media companies were forced to improve their moderation policies around extremist content on their platforms.
Ardern’s response was thrown into relief by the American president, Donald Trump, who immediately questioned whether the shooting was an act of terrorism. “It was a white man from Australia who deliberately targeted our Muslim community. He is a terrorist,” Ardern told Trump over the telephone. When Trump asked her what he could do, she had a simple answer: “You can show sympathy and love for all Muslim communities.”
The spread of COVID-19 in early 2020 was a once-in-a-century event: the kind of crisis that takes even the best prepared states by surprise.
Governments were scrambling when it arrived. Some downplayed the threat; others toyed with a let-it-rip strategy designed to achieve “herd immunity.” Most committed to “flattening the curve” – slowing the spread of the disease to prevent hospital ICUs being overwhelmed. New Zealand adopted a more radical approach: eliminating COVID-19 entirely. The nation’s borders were sealed in March 2020 and one of the world’s strictest lockdowns began. By mid-June, the disease had been suppressed. An envious world looked on as maskless New Zealanders returned to schools and offices, and normal life resumed – summer music festivals included.
When the borders re-opened in mid-2022, 90 percent of the population was vaccinated. In terms of mortality, Ardern’s elimination strategy was a total triumph: with a per capita death rate 80 percent lower than the United States, it’s estimated that Ardern’s commitment to elimination saved some 20,000 lives. New Zealand, Barack Obama said, “is better off because of [Ardern’s] remarkable leadership.”
Ardern put herself at the heart of her government’s COVID-19 strategy, personally explaining the purpose of painful policies in endless interviews, livestreams, and Zoom calls. At first, her standing soared. But as the crisis wore on, the fear initially felt by New Zealanders faded. The focus shifted; frustrations mounted. Travel bans meant missed funerals, weddings, and births. Closed borders coupled with global supply chain shocks rocked the economy, triggering a vicious cost-of-living crisis. What were 20,000 lives worth? With inflation close to 10 percent, many New Zealanders said the economic crash they were experiencing was too high a cost.
After the pandemic, there was a global trend of electorates eager to resume normal life kicking incumbents out of office. The anger in New Zealand was different. Ardern’s personal touch had made her the literal face of the pandemic response. When voters came to associate that response with steep personal costs, they didn’t blame “the government” – they blamed her. She was a lightning rod. The abuse she received was extraordinary. There were calls for her to face “Nuremberg 2.0 trials.” Eight people were prosecuted for threatening to kill her. One study found that 92 percent of all abusive posts about New Zealand’s leading politicians were directed at the prime minister. It was too much – something had to give.
Ardern remembers sitting down to play with her daughter at the height of the pandemic. It’d been a long day and she was drained. “I wasn’t there,” she recalls, “not all of me.” The only thing she could think about was pandemic-related graphs.
Public office takes a toll on its holders at the best of times. Ardern’s two terms weren’t the best of times – they were studded with crises. From terrorism to COVID-19, the Ukraine war to inflation, her government was always on the back foot scrambling to respond to uncontrollable global events. Throw in an increasingly cranky opposition, trust-corroding disinformation, and threats to her own safety, and it’s easy to understand why Ardern was burned out by late 2022.
She knew it was time to step down after a brief cancer scare. When she discovered a lump, her first feeling was relief: “Perhaps I can leave.” The lump was benign, but her response showed just how worn out she was. On January 19, 2023, she announced her resignation. A privileged role, she said, comes with responsibility – the responsibility to know when you’re the right person to lead and when you’re not. “I know what this job takes,” she concluded, “and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It’s that simple.”
Ardern left office as she entered it: convinced that a kinder politics is both possible and essential. As political journalist Philip Mathews notes, there’s a line to be traced from the kid with a stomach-ache worrying about her parents to the prime minister trying to protect New Zealand from COVID-19 and the metaphorical “virus” of racism. The Jacinda Ardern story is ultimately about care. As Mathews says, that’s why her memoir is dedicated to “the criers, worriers, and huggers.”
In this lesson to A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern, you’ve learned that Jacinda Ardern’s six years in office showed that kindness and clarity can coexist with decisiveness, even in crisis. Though the toll was heavy, Ardern governed with care, proving that compassion – far from being a weakness – can be a source of strength.
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