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It’s always already tomorrow in New Zealand, where Jacinda Ardern, a 37-year-old with a beaming smile, recently rode a wave of enthusiasm—so-called Jacindamania—to become the world’s youngest female prime minister. One breezy summer morning, not yet through with the first 100 days, and a month before she announced that she and her partner Clarke Gayford were expecting their first child, Ardern’s staff has found room in a packed schedule for tea. She opens the door of her Auckland residence, a redbrick bungalow on the outskirts of the city center, wearing a black skirt she had made while on vacation in Thailand and a Juliette Hogan cream silk shirt. “Take your shoes off; the carpet’s plush!” she says with the familiar pride of a young professional who has just renovated her first home. If not for the security detail standing in front of the garage, you wouldn’t know the leader of a country lives here, “although they were pretty happy we had a fence,” Ardern notes.
Gayford, a celebrity in his own right as the host of a television fishing show, is working on a laptop at the dining table. The couple has lived here for two years, and while they have no particular plans for marriage, they did recently adopt a cat, a ginger rescue tabby named Paddles, made famous for his plaintive interjections when Ardern took a congratulatory call from Donald Trump. Sadly, Paddles was run over by a car in November, but his food bowl still sits in memoriam under the dinner table.
Last fall Ardern attended two major international summits in quick succession—the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, at which Trump may have mistaken the New Zealander for Sophie Trudeau, wife of the Canadian prime minister, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Ardern shared the story about Trump with a comedian friend, who then told a radio host on-air. She is now more circumspect about describing her dealings with the president. “But we’ll work with anyone!” she says with mock seriousness. At an APEC dinner, Trump pointed to Ardern and, referring to the results of New Zealand’s vote, said, “This lady just caused a lot of upset in her country.” Her reply? “No one marched when I was elected.”
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Ardern is clear-eyed about what a prime minister of New Zealand, a country with a population of under five million, can achieve on the world stage. “We’re small,” she says, “but we do our bit by standing up for what we believe in.” She points to New Zealand’s long-standing nuclear-free policy as an example and wants to apply that same moral leadership to action on climate change. “We’re surrounded by island nations who will feel the brunt of climate change. So I see us as having a responsibility.” Of course New Zealand is a tiny contributor, overall, to the warming planet—and yet carbon-heavy industries like farming, horticulture, and forestry are the country’s biggest businesses. Ardern is ready to take those sectors on. “The most difficult thing for us to do is to mitigate and offset our agricultural emissions,” she says. “If we find a way to do that, then we’re showing other countries how to do it too.”
That Ardern has such a specific vision for what needs to be done is all the more remarkable when you consider that high office was very much thrust upon her. “Jacinda had an astonishing rise,” says Bryce Edwards, a political commentator for the New Zealand Herald. In July of last year, Andrew Little, the leader of the Labour Party (repeatedly described to me as “a good bloke” but “gray”), realized there was no way Labour was going to take the majority away from the right-leaning Nationals in the September election. Not with him at the helm, anyway. On July 26 he sat down with Ardern, who had by then been in parliament just shy of a decade, and proposed she take over. So loyal she still regularly texts with childhood friends, Ardern told Little he should “stick it out.” But Little’s mind was made up. Six days later he resigned, and Ardern was tasked with the impossible: to win an election already under way and in which her party’s approval rating languished in the mid-20s.
Another, human complication was that Ardern didn’t want the job. Not yet. She was from a close-knit Mormon family (part of a sizable Mormon community on New Zealand’s North Island), and she wanted to start a family of her own with Gayford. In fact, she and Gayford had been planning to seek medical assistance to conceive—something they had been told would likely be needed. Then, three weeks after her come-from-behind election, they discovered that nature had intervened. “It was a Friday night,” Ardern says on the phone the day her pregnancy news breaks. “Clarke and I just laughed about it because there was now literally nothing that could happen to me that would make this year bigger.” She adds, “But I’m not the first woman in the world to multitask.” Ardern announced on Twitter that she would continue as PM (after six weeks of maternity leave) and that Gayford, in addition to his unofficial “first man of fishing” title, would assume full-time stay-at-home dad responsibilities. This came as a delightful surprise to New Zealanders. As one popular tweet put it, referring to the Maori name for the country, “[it’s] another chance for Aotearoa to show the world what the future can look like.”
Later that day in November, we head to the campus of Auckland’s Unitec Institute of Technology, where Ardern is addressing the crowd at an event dedicated to women in leadership. On the way, a schoolboy in his early teens, dwarfed by a backpack, ambles by. “Big fan, Jacinda!” the boy shouts. Her security guard doesn’t blink.
At the college, more than 150 women, most clutching mimosas, grab Ardern for selfies. One observes, with Kiwi bluntness, that Ardern is shorter than she looks on television. She is actually five feet seven, but everything about her seems elongated, Elvish even, starting with her flowing hair, which she wears simply: down with a center part.
Talking to the crowd, she reveals a childhood aspiration to be a clown. Then she makes an improbable, but perhaps logical, comparison between clowning and politics. “Everything I’ve ever thought about doing has been in some sense about helping people,” she explains. Ardern reminds the audience that she’s a “small-town girl,” only the second in her family to go to university. “I didn’t think I would be prime minister, because I didn’t consider it. But that’s the power of saying yes, because there will be a moment when someone asks you to do something beyond your comfort zone. I am not unique.”
New Zealand has had two women prime ministers before, but neither made possibility and opportunity feel as contagious as Ardern, whose election slogan was cheerfully assertive: “Let’s do this.” And yet she became prime minister only after a tense period of negotiations (and compromise) with the nationalist NZ First party. Through it all she has spoken about issues of poverty and homelessness in her country with a blend of Bernie Sanders’s bluntness and Elizabeth Warren’s fearlessness. “Yes, we believe in globalization and trade, but we also believe in you being able to benefit from that more,” says Ardern. “For too long, we progressives have seemed like part of the system. We need to start thinking about whether or not it’s delivering for us now.”
“Jacinda communicates a radicalism that is part of the Zeitgeist,” says Edwards, the Herald’s political commentator. It helps that this populist rallying cry is being delivered from a modest three-bedroom house. It helps, too, that Ardern, the daughter of a police officer and a school-cafeteria worker, grew up just south of Auckland in the Waikato region, which is working class and conservative. As a side business, her parents cultivated apples and pears for export. Ardern would help out on the tractor after school.
Though she had been named most likely to become prime minister in high school, when Ardern joined the New Zealand Labour Party at the age of seventeen it was, she says, a “huge source of mockery for my friends.” But her political awakening came from seeing deprivation in her rural community: widespread drug and alcohol dependency; classmates with no lunch; poverty-stricken neighbors who committed suicide. Meanwhile, her favorite subject was metalwork because she could make tools; she enrolled in a double major in politics and public relations at the University of Waikato. She was elected the youngest member of the New Zealand parliament in 2008 and has been considered the left-aligned Labour Party’s brightest star ever since. Yet she still talks like an outsider looking in. “I could have found other ways to satisfy my life’s ambition than being prime minister,” she says.
The demands of Ardern’s job mean that she and Gayford have barely had time to keep up with their favorite TV shows—SVU and other “cheesy crime dramas”—let alone go to the theater or a concert. (Reports of Ardern’s stint as a DJ while at university are, she says, highly exaggerated. “I’m a tune selector,” she says while showing me her collection of nineties alternative-rock CDs. “Clarke’s the DJ.”) The two used to enjoy fishing trips, after which they’d plan elaborate dinners around their catch. Ardern is expert at preparing kingfish sashimi, but now Gayford does most of the cooking. “She’s notorious for skipping meals, and so the most important job I’ve got is to make sure she’s eating properly,” he says. The situation is a first for them both, but Gayford’s been in the neighborhood before. When I asked Ardern how he copes with a relationship spent in the spotlight, she says with a knowing smile, “Well, his previous girlfriend was on Shortland Street”—New Zealand’s preeminent soap opera—“so he’s fine.”
A few days after our meeting, Ardern, along with Gayford, is hosting a Saturday-afternoon barbecue for Auckland’s Labour Party branch leaders at the local rugby league club. She is dressed casually but, as always, favors New Zealand brands: Andrea Moore pants, Allbirds shoes (“They look like men’s slippers,” she says, “but they’re comfortable!”). It’s a corker of a day, as a Kiwi might say—sunny and bright—and among the red tents set up on the football field are plates of seasonally appropriate mince pies, shortbread, and a fruitcake on which glacé cherries spell out labour. Ardern takes it upon herself to pass slices of it around, stage-whispering to three young girls in their volleyball uniforms that she doesn’t like fruitcake much either.
Fleetwood Mac’s “Gypsy” fades out and the chirping tui birds persist as Ardern takes the microphone. She thanks the party faithful for all their work over this momentous year and asks them to “reflect on how exciting it is we have this opportunity for change in New Zealand.” Ardern has always maintained that she wants her brand of politics to be kinder—and you can feel that energy in the air, a kind of gracious optimism. “It’s going to take some time,” she says, “but in the meantime I hope people feel differently about their government.”
In this story:
Fashion Editor: Kathryn Neale.
Hair: Alan White; Makeup: Gillian Campbell.
Produced by Our Production Team, New Zealand.
Photographed at Hooker Farm Bethell’s Beach.