New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will stand down on February 7. In an announcement in Wellington, choking back tears, Ardern said she had hoped to find the energy and heart to continue in the role over summer, ‘but I have not been able to do that’.

‘I am leaving because with such a privileged job comes a big responsibility. The responsibility to know when you are the right person to lead – and also when you’re not.’

A caucus vote will be undertaken on Sunday for a new party leader – and new Prime Minister.

New Zealand has an election every three years, and yet, extraordinarily, the last time there was a one-term government was 1972. New Zealanders have something of a ‘set-and-forget’ mentality where an incumbent government usually gets the benefit of the doubt for a while, with leaders of the opposition being afforded a negligible profile.

The flipside to this is that once the rot is perceived to be setting in, after several terms, there is little a sitting New Zealand Prime Minister can do to revive their fortunes.

So, when Jacinda Ardern claims her team are well placed to take the country forward and contest the next election, saying, ‘I am not leaving because I believe we can’t win the election but because I believe we can and will,’ the reality is she will have weighed up a number of factors.

Whilst the Tories are able to ride out the present turbulence and hope for an upswing in 2024, as will the Biden administration, New Zealand’s election this year means the government will still be bearing the brunt of the coming recession. The combination of voter fatigue with an incumbent, and economic headwinds, would have played a part in Jacinda Ardern’s calculus.

Secondly, in Christopher Luxon, the opposition National party have settled upon a competent, risk averse leader who has established a credible foothold in the polls.

Furthermore, maverick centrist Winston Peters, a fixture and regular kingmaker in New Zealand politics for a quarter of a century, sidelined this term by Labour’s one-party rule, has publicly ruled out working with Labour in a prospective future coalition, limiting Labour’s options.

Lastly, she might well have decided that reputationally, and in terms of legacy, she might want to step down undefeated, with her image untarnished by the spectacle of an election night concession, followed by ‘decline and fall’ profundities from the global media.

The Christchurch Mosque massacre was a shock to the collective conscience, disrupting the notion of New Zealand’s insular, isolated presence at the bottom of the world. The pandemic brought enormous challenges, initial plaudits, then a long hangover and a sometimes inchoate but vigorous libertarian swell of grievance rarely seen on these shores. The pandemic skewed and disrupted targets, drew away attention and resources, and made policies around poverty and equality difficult to assess and quantify.

As I wrote previously, many people envisage Jacinda Ardern’s 2017 electoral victory as a romp, a 1997 Tony Blair-esque sea change of optimism. In reality, in the months leading up to that election Ardern’s Labour party was by no means a sure bet. In a similar way, Ardern’s first term as PM is thought of as unified and productive. People believe she was always going to coast to re-election before Covid hit. In fact, Ardern’s government may have been in a parlous enough state to lose, before being suddenly given focus and massive public backing in responding to the pandemic.

It was the 2020 election, set against the backdrop of Covid-19, that delivered Labour its triumphant majority and the power to govern alone.

In 2017 and 2020, New Zealanders were voting for an undefined product in Ardern. Now, they seem to be pivoting from idealism to pragmatism.

For all that, Jacinda Ardern’s legacy, whilst patchy, is likely to improve over time. In polling, she remains the most popular politician in the country. Whilst her profile globally was sometimes undoubtedly buoyed by positive projection, and by spirit as much as by reality, it is also bemusing the extent to which she has become a source of vitriolically negative projection from overseas. She is not only the subject of equine-themed personal insults, but is seen as a villain of government imposition and mandates, with many foreign observers seeming to have willed into reality a massive public backlash against her, a nation languishing as cattle under the dictates of government commissars. The reality is that the public was overwhelmingly behind the government during the pandemic and there was mass solidarity, with almost no whinging and complaining until relatively recently, and even that was a modest minority. Ardern’s difficulties, and calculus, were down to a multitude of factors, overwhelmingly legislative and economic.

Jacinda Ardern brought entirely new things to politics. Hers was an utterly unique alchemy of mystique and relatability. It was extraordinary how those disparate things could maximise in one public figure. She would be met with glowing faces and pose for innumerable selfies during walkabouts in shopping malls, her allure being that she was simultaneously a global figure, and the cousin or auntie who was imbuing stale politics with authenticity and accessibility.

The allure has faded, and now she’s gone, but my expectation is that, after a hiatus, she will reappear and follow the model of the last Labour prime minister, Helen Clark, who went on to become the head of the United Nations Global Development Fund. Ardern will quite possibly establish herself as a similar internationalist.

‘This has been the most fulfilling five and a half years of my life,’ Ardern said, reflecting on her tenure. For many, it is a tenure defined by ‘what if,’ as much as by its accomplishments. By emotional intelligence, but not enough shovels in the ground.