Politics of kindness

Ardern won our hearts with her composed, empathetic response to the white supremacist terrorist attack

With much of the world, east or west, seemingly engulfed in a crisis of good leadership, it is easy to give in to despair. In nations that once stood out as paragons of tolerance, ideologues now sow divisions. In others, the space progressives had won inch by inch over decades appears to have slipped out of their hands once more. Preying on anxieties triggered by an uncertain future, populists have foregone attempts to restrain our worst collective tendencies and are instead egging us on. Even so, there are still a handful of comparatively young leaders that give some reason for hope. The easy re-election of one of them, New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, suggests that kindness, empathy and responsible governance will trump adversarial politics, should her contemporaries take a page from her playbook.

For most of us in Pakistan, Ardern won our hearts with her composed and more importantly, empathetic response to the white supremacist terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch. In the aftermath of the grisly incident that claimed the lives of 51 worshippers, she stood in unwavering solidarity with the victims and vowed she would render the perpetrator ‘nameless’. And to others, she implored: “Speak the names of those who were lost rather than the name of the man who took them.” But Ardern’s nascent legacy did not stop with one tragedy. In the face of Covid-19, when most world leaders wavered in response, she and her government acted decisively. New Zealand was among the world’s quickest nations in enforcing a nationwide lockdown and was the first to reach zero transmissions during the first wave of Covid-19 cases.

As high profile as they may be, both these challenges hide what is really at the heart of her success. A profile The New York Times published in May identified two forces: good old fashioned hard work to forge strong connections with her constituents and political system that forces all parties to work together. These, coupled with her attentiveness and empathy with the sentiments of her nation, have come to define a leadership style observers have dubbed the ‘politics of kindness’.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 10^th, 2020.

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