Review | How kind can a leader be? Jacinda Ardern makes the case for compassion. (2025)

Ardern did not seem destined for her country’s top political job. Raised in a conservative Mormon community, she portrays herself as a dutiful rather than outstanding student, the thin-skinned daughter of a small-town police officer. But she proved to be a gifted debater who understood that her passion for social justice — gay rights, children’s welfare and fighting the climate crisis — would best be realized through policymaking.

Her rise through politics was gradual, until 2017, when she became deputy leader and then leader of the progressive Labour Party after others stepped aside. Then things moved quickly. Mere months later, she was named prime minister after post-election talks convinced a smaller, third party to pick Labour to form a coalition government.

Ardern was 37 years old at the time, unwed and newly pregnant following fertility treatment. She launched on an approach to leadership that seems radical in retrospect — a latter-day Lincoln, with malice toward none.

“Kindness has a power and strength that almost nothing else on this planet has,” Ardern writes. “I’d seen kindness do extraordinary things. I’d seen it give people hope; I’d seen it change minds and transform lives. … This would be my guiding principle no matter what lay ahead.”

It was an admirable and challenging goal with no easy measure of success. In fact, Ardern rejected some quantifiable measures, such as setting a target for reducing suicide rates because she didn’t want to accept the possibility of any suicides.

She maintained her empathy even as she faced international-headline-grabbing tests: a disease outbreak that led to the slaughter of herds of cattle, a mass shooting at a Christchurch mosque, a volcanic eruption that incinerated tourists, and a global pandemic.

It was her management of the covid-19 crisis that deservedly brought Ardern global acclaim. She pored over public health data before putting in place strict containment measures, closing borders to noncitizens and creating quarantine centers for returning travelers, as well as designing an elaborate domestic alert system to control the virus’s spread. She supported comprehensive contact tracing: After a retail worker tested positive, public health officials embarked on an exhaustive investigation to figure out how the woman had become infected, until their analysis of security camera footage revealed she had passed a contagious quarantine worker on the street.

The impact of Ardern’s wonkish strategy was stunning. The island nation succeeded in suppressing transmission within months and maintaining low infection and mortality rates until vaccines became available. One year into the outbreak, when the United States had suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths, New Zealand had recorded just 25 (“I knew the stories and circumstances of almost all of them,” Ardern writes).

Ardern’s book is part political, part domestic memoir. She writes about leading as a woman and managing the uneasy work-life balance. Her anecdotes will resonate with any working mother — about breast pumps, birthday cakes and behind-the-scenes child-care crises. She describes her (somewhat surprising) agreement to be photographed for a magazine in three-quarter-length shapewear. She recalls the shakiness that sometimes stole her voice and how she completely “fell apart” after visiting victims of the mosque shooting.

She also had the savvy to use her raw emotional response to galvanize political action, enacting new gun laws that limited the number of rounds for a pump-action shotgun and then calling tech giants, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Brad Smith, to help eliminate extremist content online in what became known as the Christchurch Call to Action.

But the very qualities that fueled Ardern’s leadership also threatened her success. Her father saw his younger daughter as too thin-skinned for politics. Former prime minister Helen Clark, Ardern writes, had shown her it was possible to be a woman in politics. But nobody had shown her that “you could be sensitive and survive,” she writes.

In January 2023, Arden announced that she was stepping down. At times, this memoir reads like a means of making sense of that decision, which came as a surprise to many. It may have been an astute face-saving move: Labour had won a landslide victory in 2020 under Ardern’s leadership, allowing the party to form the first majority government since 1996. Months after her resignation in 2023, the party suffered a resounding electoral defeat.

But the relentless demands of public life were taking a toll on Ardern, particularly with the rise of disinformation and a new level of mistrust in government and science. A brief breast cancer scare allowed a liberating thought to cross Ardern’s mind: “Perhaps I could leave.” Her daughter, Neve, now 5, was beginning to ask more pressing, guilt-inducing questions about her mother’s work.

If “A Different Kind of Power” suffers from its author’s earnestness, particularly in the mundane descriptions of her childhood, Ardern compensates by injecting humor, recalling, for instance, the story of the marriage proposal by Neve’s father, Clarke Gayford, who popped the question on a hike while a security guard hovered on the periphery of the couple’s private moment. Also she confesses that she tried but failed to get a part as an extra on Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” film, a story she shared with Stephen Colbert when she picked him up at the airport and, on camera, belted out “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

“A Different Kind of Power” leaves readers with a troubling question: Can someone who puts a premium on kindness — who responds with genuine compassion to repeated disasters and acts of blatant cruelty — bear the burdens of leadership, particularly in the modern world, where instant ugly rumor often replaces fact?

How kind can a leader afford to be?

Frances Stead Sellers is an associate editor of The Washington Post.

A Different Kind of Power

By Jacinda Ardern.

Crown. 352 pp. $32