Nicholas Sheppard

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is currently leading a trade mission to the United States, with a meeting between her, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris pencilled in for later this week. Her appeal on the world stage is evident – the New York Times over the weekend hailed her ‘inspiring’ – but there is a considerable disconnect now between her high regard internationally and the discontent she is facing domestically. Ardern has several goals. One is spreading the word post-Covid that New Zealand is open for business. But she also wants to beef up international trade and regional security. The US has attempted to pivot to Indo-Pacific in recent years, but that plan is now in question after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

'Kindness and not being afraid to be kind,' says New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, is the key to her leadership. Try telling that to the family of a 12-year-old from the Philippines, who has been banned from moving to New Zealand due to potential costs to the country's healthcare system associated with her autism. For half of her life, Arianna Alfonzo has lived away from her father, a construction industry worker in Auckland. Her mother, Gail Alfonzo, has stayed with Arianna overseas. Both parents have permanent residency status in New Zealand. A #LetAriannaStayNZ petition, which has got over 2,000 signatures, follows a nearly 35,000-signature petition submitted to Parliament last year. But still Ardern's government refuses to back down.

Jacinda Ardern, once the golden girl of New Zealand politics, is in trouble. The country's main opposition party, National, is edging ahead of the prime minister's Labour government in the polls for the first time in two years, having opened up a two point lead. And while Adern is still the favoured pick to be PM her personal ratings have tumbled sharply: dipping down to 34 per cent from 58 per cent at the end of 2020. Is time up for Ardern? When she won re-election in a landslide in October 2020, Ardern's handling of the pandemic in the months before was generally credited as the reason why.

Jacinda Ardern’s Labour party has won re-election in a landslide. Her government improved its vote-share by around 12 per cent from the last election in 2017, its best result since 1938. New Zealand’s political system is proportional, allowing minor parties garnering more than 5 per cent of the vote to enter Parliament. Jacinda Ardern’s victory is so emphatic that, for the first time since the proportional system was set in place in 1996, it appears a majority party will be able to govern alone, without needing coalition parties or any kind of confidence and supply agreement. The machinery of the electoral system wasn’t really designed for such a result.

When New Zealanders head to the polls this weekend, Jacinda Ardern seems all but certain to secure a resounding victory. So is this proof of the popularity of Ardern's zero-Covid strategy? There is no doubt Ardern's approach to the pandemic has been popular in New Zealand. Early on in the outbreak, the Labour party leader presented a national strategy. 'We go hard, we go early,' she told Kiwis in March, setting out in detail the four 'alert' stages and what would be required. A small population, no land borders, and no international flight hubs, meant that the country was able to shut down quickly, with relatively few deaths.