It was on the verge of tears, her voice sometimes a little trembling, that Jacinda Ardern, the head of the New Zealand government, announced, Thursday, January 19, her decision to resign. The one who had become, in October 2017, the youngest Kiwi prime minister in one hundred and sixty-one years before being triumphantly re-elected in October 2020, will leave office by February 7. An announcement that created a shock wave in the archipelago as it is rare for a leader to renounce power, especially when he enjoys the popularity of the 42-year-old leader.
“I gave everything to be Prime Minister, but it also cost me a lot. You cannot and should not do this work unless you have a full tank, and even more in reserve for the unforeseen and unexpected challenges that inevitably arise”, she said at a press conference. “I just don’t have enough energy for another four years”added the elected Labor who, over the past five years, has proven to be solid as a rock when a succession of crises has rocked her country: from the mass shooting by a white supremacist in two mosques in Christchurch, March 15, 2019, to the arrival of Covid-19, in February 2020, passing through the eruption of the White Island volcano, on December 9, 2019, during which 21 people died.
Her calm, her determination and the quality of her leadership had earned her the designation, by a poll carried out in May 2020, as the most popular New Zealand head of government for a century and to be noticed on the international scene. as « the anti-Trump »according to the nickname given by some English media. “She showed that you can be a benevolent and competent leaderanalyzes Jennifer Lees-Marshment, professor of political marketing at the University of Auckland, and also head of a government and mother. »
It was by becoming the second prime minister in the world to have a child during her term, after the Pakistani Benazir Bhutto, that the center-left leader first made herself known abroad. The former amateur DJ announced the birth of her daughter on social networks in June 2018, before slipping away for six weeks of maternity leave, reinforcing her image of simplicity and normality in her country. Qualities that had already earned him a lightning ascent on the New Zealand political scene. Propelled as a candidate less than two months before the legislative elections of September 2017 and placed at the head of a Labor party then showing nearly 20 points behind her rival in the polls, she had, against all odds, sent the Conservatives back to the ranks of the opposition after nine years of rule.
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