Jacinda Ardern, the global phenomenon sweeps home

Three years ago, hardly anyone would have been able to say the name of a New Zealand prime minister.

But Jacinda Ardern's (Hamilton, 40 years old) is

.

And not only yesterday, when he swept revalidating his mandate with 49% of the votes.

These have been called “the covid elections”, because their management of the pandemic has pushed the results, but the world has been looking towards these remote islands of the Pacific for three years to decipher a policy that, in a moment of wild polarization, drives the powerful speech of empathy.

Mentioned as a possible Nobel Peace Prize winner, she has appeared on all the lists of powerful women and on the covers, from

magazine

to the cover of

to be celebrated both for her kind demeanor and for her effective handling of crises, in addition to the covid, the Christchurch attack - in which 51 people were killed in two mosques - or the eruption of the Whakarii volcano.

In his victory speech, which started in perfect Maori, Ardern yesterday lamented that the world has "lost the ability to see another's point of view."

"New Zealand has shown that we are not like that, after all we are [a nation] too small to lose sight of the perspective of others."

And the world looked back at her.

Jacinda Ardern won her first election at just 17 years old.

As a spokesperson for the students at her high school, she campaigned for girls to wear pants instead of uniform skirts.

A triumph for a teenage girl who got so nervous speaking before an audience that she was left speechless: "It filled me with terror and it was one of the many reasons why I never imagined doing something that involved a life dedicated to public speaking" , confessed before the congress of the Labor Party.

Ardern became a MP for the formation in 2008. Five general elections later, she has achieved an unprecedented level of popularity for a New Zealand politician, both within and outside the country, and the formation's biggest victory in 50 years.

In recent weeks her campaign rallies have turned into mass toilets, with thousands of citizens following her down the street to get a

Behind its success against the pandemic is the team of scientists who in March recommended to the Prime Minister that she adopt the “elimination strategy”, to prevent the virus from saturating the New Zealand health system (with almost 5 million inhabitants) and especially its limited capacity for intensive medicine (5.5 ICUs per 100,000 inhabitants).

This strategy, which the policy defined as "going hard and early" seeks directly to end the pandemic, not to flatten the contagion curve, which requires strict border closure measures or absolute quarantines before cases skyrocket.

“This strategy has worked very well in New Zealand, which has the lowest COVID-19 mortality in the OECD, with a total of 25 deaths, representing five deaths per million inhabitants.

It has also allowed us to return to almost normal economic and social activity, ”says epidemiologist Michael Baker, advisor to the Ministry of Health.

Attacked for failing to comply with her electoral program

The pandemic has wrapped Jacinda Ardern in a cloak of heroin, but the center-right National Party has stressed during the campaign that the prime minister has not carried out her electoral promises, such as her flagship project, the Kiwibuild, which promised to build 16,000 affordable houses to tackle the housing crisis, but he has only completed 450. And the child poverty figures have not dropped, even though Ardern has always defined this cause as one of the foundations of his career.

In her first speech as Labor leader in 2017, Ardern explained that growing up in Murupara, on the country's north island, marked her forever, and that she still remembers “children who didn't have shoes, not even in winter when the puddles are froze ”.

Murupara, Ardern said, “was not the place or the moment where I became a politician.

It was the moment when I developed empathy ”.

That continues to be his great asset.

Its popularity is due precisely to an honest and compassionate image.

He criticizes that politics has become a "bloody sport" that causes apathy and detachment among young people.

According to Massey University governance expert Suze Wilson, "Ardern wants to offer another type of leadership based on a collaborative model, which focuses on caring for and caring for people."

A model opposed to the tough and combative style of Trump or Bolsonaro, and considers that Ardern's personality "is crucial in combating the manipulation and cynicism of traditional politics, which tends to undermine the level of trust in democratic processes."

The opposition criticizes that Labor has spent the campaign showing Ardern because it does not have an effective plan to face the next three years. New Zealand officially entered a recession last quarter and the National Party believes that the Government cannot continue to increase public debt with more subsidies for covid-19, thanks to which unemployment is contained at only 4%. Criticisms that, for the moment, do not wear down the status of the prime minister. The world didn't know who Jacinda Ardern was until three months after taking office in 2017 she announced that she was pregnant with her first child. Now he faces the greatest challenge of his career with the attention of the entire international press: keeping the pandemic out of New Zealand without ruining the economy and fulfilling, this time, his program to achieve a “progressive transformation” of the country.