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New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern at the 2022 Apec meeting
The greatest propellant of prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s slide in popularity is mostly outside her control – economic waves that will probably keep pummelling New Zealand voters well into 2023. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/EPA
The greatest propellant of prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s slide in popularity is mostly outside her control – economic waves that will probably keep pummelling New Zealand voters well into 2023. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/EPA

Jacinda Ardern’s popularity plummeted this year. Things could get worse in 2023

This article is more than 1 year old

The demise of ‘Jacindamania’ comes on the cusp of an election year, as New Zealand faces severe economic headwinds

“Bring it on,” Jacinda Ardern told a cheering crowd in early November, addressing party members at Labour’s last conference before the next election. It was a battle-cry for a party and leader who know there’s a tough fight ahead.

In the weeks that followed, political headwinds accelerated: projections of a recession, stubbornly high inflation, national fears over crime, grim polling and enduring pockets of anti-government conspiracists dominated the news cycle. The last year and a half have been brutal for the progressive leader, who has slipped from near-unprecedented levels of popularity to some of the lowest polling of her political career.

Jacindamania’s demise

Ardern outside parliament in Wellington after a swearing-in ceremony in 2017. Photograph: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

The last polls of 2022 had Labour at about 33%, compared with the centre-right National party’s 38-39%. Those results are among the lowest of Ardern’s leadership, representing a turn back toward the bleak polling the Labour party was mired in when she first took over in 2017.

Back then, the party’s gamble on a talented but relatively inexperienced MP paid off richly. Ardern’s leadership was embraced with an enthusiasm dubbed “Jacindamania”, boosting the party’s fortunes by as much as 20 percentage points and leading Labour to a 2017 coalition-based election victory that seemed implausible a few months earlier.

Her clear communication and progressive credentials won international admiration, presenting a convincing liberal foil in an era dominated by Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson. In the years that followed, her popularity soared in New Zealand and overseas, boosted by her response to a series of crises and the strength of the country’s Covid response.

Internationally, that star power has endured – but at home, the prime minister’s fall in popularity has been steady. Now, with an election slated for 2023, Ardern is faced with the task of again invigorating a Labour party with flagging support – this time, as a known quantity and with a decidedly less optimistic public behind her.

Ardern greets Finland prime minister Sanna Marin, left, in Auckland in November. Photograph: Diego Opatowski/AFP/Getty Images

The economy

The greatest propellant of Ardern’s slide sits mostly outside her control: a set of economic waves that will probably keep pummelling voters well into election year. New Zealand’s reserve bank, staring down an inflation rate of 7.2%, has announced its plans to engineer a “shallow recession” in 2023 to try to jolt the country out of the inflationary cycle. Already, the bank has hiked the official cash rate, driving up homeowners’ mortgage payments. Petrol prices started spiking mid-year, and grocery costs are up 10.7% annually.

Much of this is playing out across the world – but knowledge of the wider context seems unlikely to win over New Zealanders.

“You can explain away about inflation and external forces but it has no effect on the voter – every time they fill up the car, every time they go to get kai [food], they’re considering their circumstances and their government,” says Shane te Pou, a political commentator and former executive member of the Labour party.

A closed-down clothing shop in Shannon on New Zealand’s North Island in January 2020. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

With the success of the Covid response fading from immediate memory, the population has grown increasingly pessimistic: polling on whether people “think the country is going in the right direction” started tracking down from a high of 70% in early 2021 to 30% at the end of this year. That loss of confidence goes deeper than voters’ taste for any single political party or leader and spells deep trouble for an incumbent government.

But as New Zealanders – and opposition politicians – have become increasingly fixated on economic challenges, Ardern’s government has had a full plate of other policy priorities.

“People’s focus has been on family budgets – they’ve been very concerned about what’s happening to their jobs, their mortgage repayments, how much it costs to buy groceries and petrol,” says Neale Jones, a political commentator and former chief of staff to Ardern. “And so they expect the government to show the same laser focus that they’ve been feeling.”

Instead, he says, “the government’s been trying to do a lot and hasn’t really been able to explain all of it well”.

Ardern emerged from Covid restrictions with a backlog of policy projects delayed by the intensity of pandemic governance. A packed 2022 schedule included complex reform projects to address greenhouse gas emissions, resource management, water governance, a proposed merger of public broadcasters, and ailing health and criminal justice systems.

Few of these reforms have been uncontroversial, and in many cases the government has struggled to communicate the purpose of its projects, says University of Auckland political scientist Dr. Lara Greaves.

“It should be fairly easy to sell something like needing to rework the water infrastructure,” she says. “We’ve seen them being quite crunched for time because of their policy schedule … but [those reforms] haven’t really been sold to the public in a way where they can see why it’s necessary.”

A return to strength will require sacrificing some of those policy objectives to win back New Zealanders who are now primarily concerned with living costs and the economy, Jones says.

Ardern has already acknowledged this, announcing a paring back of policy in 2023 to focus on the economy.

A ‘toxic note’

Protesters against the government’s plans to tax emissions from farm animals, in Wellington in October. Photograph: Marty Melville/AFP/Getty Images

The campaign year ahead could also pose new challenges, particularly for parties on the left, which have become the targets of furious anti-government groups. 2022 marked the emergence of a “huge toxic note,” in New Zealand politics, says te Pou.

Pockets of dissatisfaction with the Covid response and vaccine mandates hardened into a seething – sometimes violent – core of conspiracy-minded and anti-government feeling. Protesters occupied parliament’s lawns for weeks, with some calling for the prime minister to be hung from a gallows, starting riots, lighting fires, razing public facilities and hurling bricks at police.

Even after the protesters were cleared, some associated groups continued to simmer. Abuse and threats against politicians have risen significantly, police report, with several men prosecuted for making repeated violent threats against Ardern. That environment could mean a sharp change from the dynamics of campaigns past, when the prime minister was mobbed by crowds at community events and shopping malls.

“2022 was a really significant change in the way that our politics operates,” says Jones. “​​I think the 2023 campaign will look very different to previous campaigns – New Zealand’s traditionally relaxed, casual democracy where the public has great access to politicians becomes too much of a security risk.”

While recent polls have projected the formation of a National-Act coalition, a year is a long time in politics – and New Zealand’s tight, coalition-based elections are known to take unexpected turns, with minor parties and slim margins often deciding the outcome. National’s own policy offering so far is thin and lacking detail, Greaves says – so it remains to be seen whether what they put forward will resonate with New Zealanders. In the meantime, some of Ardern’s star power may have worn off but, Te Pou says, the skills that propelled her to previous heights are still there. “The longer she’s around, the more people get used to her. But she’s still the best communicator out.”

If she can effectively turn those skills to the economic storm, Jones says, she may still be able to scrape another shot at governance.

“Part of what was so successful with Jacinda Ardern’s communication through the Covid was that there was a singular focus: she was able to send a clear message to New Zealanders about what the plan was to get out of it,” Jones says. “I think that would be the sort of strength that Jacinda could lean back on to win a third term.”

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