We publish below an article by "The Atlantic" journalist Uri Friedman on the leadership lesson that the young New Zealand prime minister is giving to the world in tackling the COVID-19 crisis.
Jacinda Ardern, 39, leader of the Labor Party of New Zealand has been leading a minority government since October 2007. At 37 years old she became the youngest woman in the world to take over the leadership of a government. His attitude on the occasion of the terrorist attack against the Islamic community in Christchurch on 15 March 2019 left an important mark. His strong speech in Parliament "I will not tell his name" is available here in Italian translation.
To each his own style
The coronavirus pandemic is the greatest test of leadership that a politician is called to demonstrate. Every political leader in the world is facing the same threat and the same challenge. There are not many disparities in this common destiny. Each leader reacts in a specific and even personal way, that is, he reacts with his own style. And every leader will be judged on the results he achieves.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel relies on science. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro rejects it. US President Donald Trump's daily briefings are a sideshow, while Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi holds no briefings, despite keeping nearly XNUMX billion people in lockdown.
Jacinda Ardern, the 39-year-old prime minister of New Zealand, is forging a path of her own. Her leadership style is one of empathy in a crisis where people are being pushed to fend for themselves. Her messages are clear, coherent and, at the same time, sober and calming. And her approach doesn't just have an emotional calming effect. And it is no small thing if it is true that the trough promotes contagion. But his approach also works very well in practice.
Jacinda Ardern's style
People know that Ardern “doesn't preach, she stands with them,” says Helen Clark, New Zealand's prime minister from 1999 to 2008. Ardern, the current leader of the Labor Party, began working in politics for Clark during the government of the latter. She says Clark:
People are made to think, 'Well, I don't understand why the government did this, but I know it protects us. There is a high level of trust in Ardern because of this empathy.
She's "a communicator," she adds, mentioning that Ardern has a degree in communications.
“This is the kind of crisis that will make or break a leader. And it will be this crisis that will make Jacinda a leader.”
One of Ardern's innovations is the Facebook Live chat she holds regularly. During these moments she manages to be both informal and informative. During one session, held in late March just as New Zealand was preparing to go into lockdown, she appeared at her house in a rather worn sweatshirt (she had just put her baby to bed, she explained) to comfort people "while we are all preparing to hole up,” he added.
He showed a lot of understanding when the emergency warning sirens blared which essentially told all New Zealanders that life, as they had known it, was over. He resorted to simple concepts like these: “thinking about the people who will always be with you during this period of time”, “your bubble”, “acting as if you already have COVID-19 towards those outside your bubble".
He explained strict policies with practical examples: people have to move in a local area, because what could happen if their car breaks down en route to some remote destination? He said he knows, as a parent, that it's really hard to stay away from children's playgrounds, but the virus can live on surfaces for 72 hours.
A personal touch
The duration of the isolation would not be short, Ardern kept repeating, and she also expected that cases would soar even with the quarantine of New Zealanders. Due to the very nature of the coronavirus, “you will not be able to see the positive benefits of all the efforts you are about to self-isolate… for at least 10 days. So don't be discouraged, hold on!” she said.
On a recent Facebook Live, one of Ardern's collaborators walked into her office just as Jacinda was launching into a detailed description of what life would be like once the government began to ease the lockdown. “Oh look, it's Leroy!” she exclaimed, assuring onlookers that he was safe in her "work bubble." A children's toy was visible just behind the desk. The scene seemed fitting for an era where work and life vied for people's time.
While Ardern conducts more formal and conventional daily briefings with other senior officials and journalists, she puts her own spin on these too. “Trump briefs him, but this is a different kind of show,” Clark says. "On no occasion has Jacinda ever spun and attacked a journalist who asked an uncomfortable question", observes Clark again in reference to the American president's repeated invectives against journalists. When a reporter forgot the question during a recent briefing, Ardern jokingly told him she was worried she wasn't getting enough sleep.
The gentle push
“It doesn't peddle disinformation; does not blame the change; tries to manage everyone's expectations while offering reassuring notes,” Van Jackson, an international relations scholar at Victoria University of Wellington and a former Defense Department official during the Obama administration, wrote to me in an email.
“Use Trump's own pulpit to propel society towards better horizons. Be nice to each other and stuff like that. I think it's more important than people realize, and it drives a lot of behaviors."
Ardern's style would be very interesting — a world leader in comfortable clothes who casually chats with millions of people! — And nothing more than that, if it weren't for the fact that his approach has led to policies that have produced real, world-leading results.
New Zealand is the only country to not only have flattened the curve of coronavirus cases, as has also happened in most other countries, but also to eliminate the virus completely. And it's well on its way to doing it permanently. COVID-19 tests are very widespread. The health system was not overloaded, new cases peaked in early April, a few dozen people were missing, out of a population of nearly 5 million.
As a relatively isolated archipelago at the bottom of the South Pacific, New Zealand is well placed to eliminate the virus. “Because we had very few native cases, we could actually work towards an elimination strategy for the virus,” Clark said. “It's definitely an advantage to be crouched on the edge of the world, because you get the chance to see what's going on in the rest of the planet.”
Timely decisions
Nonetheless, Ardern's government immediately intervened decisively. New Zealand imposed a nationwide lockdown much earlier than other countries during the outbreak. It banned travelers from China as early as early February, before a single case of the virus was recorded in the country. It closed its borders to all non-residents in mid-March, when it had just a handful of cases.
Michael Baker and Nick Wilson, two of New Zealand's top public health experts, wrote last week that even if the ambitious strategy failed, early intervention bought time for insiders to design and implement measures that could ending the transmission of the coronavirus, such as strict quarantine, closing the country's borders, expanding COVID-19 testing and contact tracing.
Jackson, the scholar of international relations, said that the decision, at the beginning of the crisis, by the Ardern government to deploy the four-level alert system (it moved to level 4 at the end of March):
“it worked beautifully in preparing us psychologically for a step forward in dealing with the seriousness of the challenge, a model that could not be more different from Trump's approach of living from day to day.”
The success, of course, is not all due to Ardern; it is also the product of an impressive collective effort by public health institutions, opposition politicians and New Zealanders as a whole to comply with social restrictions.
A new difficult phase
And that collective effort could also fray. Even as the government has launched many economic stimulus measures, some opposition politicians and public health experts are now calling for the lockdown, which could be eased soon, to be further eased. They accuse the government of overreacting and argue that Australia has managed to reduce new coronavirus cases without the lockdown imposed on New Zealand.
Ardern's figure is similar to Barack Obama in that she is "polarizing at home while popular abroad," says Jackson.
A survey conducted in early April by market research firm Colmar Brunton found that 88% of New Zealanders trust the government to make the right decisions about how to deal with COVID-19 and 84% approve of the government response to the pandemic. That's a higher approval rating than governments in the world's seven largest advanced economies, including the United States. New Zealand citizens have decided to support government policies even though many are aware of the economic consequences, at least in the short term.
Jackson noted that while Ardern and many young European leaders have navigated the coronavirus crisis competently, we now need to see how this new generation of leaders will handle what comes next. In this regard Jackson observes:
“Strategic decision making and crisis decision making are very different. The world will change, largely for the worse, over the next few years. A great depression seems almost inevitable. China's strategic opportunism knows no bounds. Dictators around the world are using the pandemic to consolidate control of society. Multilateral institutions are not delivering the promised results. Overcoming this crisis intact is just one step in a longer process towards a new and braver world.”
