Jacinda Ardern and Jeremy Corbyn — A Tale of Two Elections

The year is 2017. The Labour Party is struggling in the polls, hovering in the mid-20s going into a general election. The consensus is that the conservative government, led by a new leader elected the previous year, is on course for another term in government.

Then in the space of a seven week campaign, something remarkable happens. Campaigning on an optimistic platform of transformational change, Labour turns their polling around, surging in the polls by more than 10%. Young people in particular are inspired by this new message. Suddenly, it looks like a close election.

There is no clear winner on election night. Labour falls short of becoming the largest party, winning 8% fewer seats than their conservative rivals, but the incumbent government lacks the overall majority needed to declare victory. It will be down to the minor parties to decide who becomes Prime Minister.

But which election am I talking about? This is both the story of Jacinda Ardern’s remarkable election turnaround in the 2017 New Zealand general election — and of Jeremy Corbyn’s even more remarkable comeback in the UK election of the same year.

The Differences

Most people would not compare Ardern to Corbyn. The differences are obvious. For a start, Ardern is a woman who became the world’s youngest female leader when she was elected Prime Minister in 2017. Corbyn is an older man who never won an election.

Ardern was marked down as a star of the future from the moment she entered parliament in 2008, and was unanimously anointed NZ Labour leader in 2017. Corbyn was a life-long campaigner who had been a rebellious backbench MP from 1983 right up until his shock election as UK Labour leader in 2015.

Ardern was the darling of both Labour MPs and party members; Corbyn had huge support from the membership, but was much reviled by his own MPs, who tried to remove him as leader less than a year after he was voted in.

The circumstances of their 2017 election campaigns were also entirely different. Ardern was elected leader of the Labour Party on 1 August, as it had become clear to her predecessor Andrew Little that he had a fairly small chance of victory. Ardern was a far more popular figure who would have a much greater chance of success. It was her personal charisma and campaigning style that took Labour from an average of 26.4% in polls taken during July to 36.9% in the election on 23 September.

Corbyn was elected leader by 59.5% of Labour Party members on 12 September 2015, having been given odds of 200/1 when he declared his candidacy. In 2016 he had to fight off a no-confidence motion by 80% of his MPs and a leadership challenge which saw him receive an even bigger mandate from party members than the year prior — 61.8%. In the month prior to the general election being called on 18 April 2017, Labour were polling even worse — 25.4%.

Yet in two respects, Corbyn’s election turnaround was even more impressive. He didn’t need to step down for a younger, more charismatic, better media-trained leader to do it. And on 8 June, his party won 41.0% of the vote. That’s an increase of 15.6% in 51 days for Corbyn, versus an increase of 10.5% in 53 days for Ardern. UK Labour under Corbyn won a 4.1% higher vote share than NZ Labour under Ardern, and were just 2.4% shy of Theresa May’s Conservatives, as opposed to NZ Labour finishing 7.6% behind Bill English’s National Party.

All of this is despite the fact that Corbyn faced a vicious attack campaign from the British media, his own MPs, and even party staff. Ardern received universal support from MPs and party staff, and neutral-to-positive treatment from most of the media.

The ultimate outcome of these two elections was in both cases decided by the electoral system and the minor parties involved. The UK’s first-past-the-post system meant that the Conservatives won 48.8% of the seats, 8.5% more than Labour, and were able to govern with the support of the DUP, a right-wing party from the north of Ireland.

In NZ, National won 46.7% of the seats, 8.3% more than Labour. But because NZ’s proportional representation system (MMP) allows fair seat distributions for minor parties, the combination of Labour’s 38.3% and the left-wing Green Party’s 6.7% meant that NZ First, a centrist-populist party who won 7.5%, were the kingmakers. NZ First leader Winston Peters, ever the canny opportunist, chose to go into coalition with Labour, and thus he made Ardern Prime Minister.

These differences in electoral systems led Ardern and Corbyn on wildly different trajectories. Ardern was reelected in a historic landslide in 2020, and led Aotearoa through the pandemic, finally stepping down on 25 January 2023 after just over five years in office. Corbyn, meanwhile, suffered a devastating defeat in the 2019 UK election at the hands of Boris Johnson, and ended his tenure as Leader of the Opposition on 4 April 2020 after four-and-a-half years.

Today, Ardern is widely seen as a great success story, the very image of what a progressive, empathetic leader in the 21st Century should look like. Corbyn is near-universally maligned for the alleged crime of destroying the Labour Party and dooming the UK to seven more years of Tory rule. But is that fair?

Style vs. Substance

Ardern’s slogan for her 2017 election campaign was “Let’s Do This.” Corbyn’s slogan was “For the Many, Not the Few.” This points to the most crucial difference of these campaigns — style vs. substance.

Ardern succeeding Little as leader was a cosmetic change. There was a new, more popular face at Labour’s helm, with altered rhetoric, but the policies stayed almost entirely the same. Little went into the election with an unambitious platform, and Ardern left this intact. They intended to make some changes to tackle child poverty and climate change, but without altering Aotearoa's low-tax, low-spend, low-wage economy in any major way. This was highlighted in Labour and the Greens’ joint Budget Responsibility Rules, which vowed to keep government spending, surpluses and debt at around the same level the centre-right National Government had left them. Both Little and Ardern essentially believed that the country was fundamentally headed in the right direction, with some minor course corrections needed.

Ardern’s rhetoric, however, was much more ambitious and inspiring than Little’s. She vowed to lead “a government of transformation,” talked about climate change as her generation’s “nuclear free moment,” and even went so far as to say that capitalism was a “blatant failure” when it came to matters such as homelessness. Yet the slogan “Let’s Do This” belied the real ambition — simply to get Labour elected. It was lifted directly from a Facebook post rallying activists to get out and campaign for the party. Style, not substance.

Corbyn meant every single word he said about the need for transformative change. A lifelong socialist, he was the first leading British politician in three decades to oppose the free market reforms of Thatcher. If elected, his government would have sought to return the UK to the much more equal society which existed before the 1980s. His campaign slogan was inspired by radical 19th Century romantic poet Percy Shelley’s words:

Rise, like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number!

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you:

Ye are many—they are few!

Ardern spoke of transformation whilst committing to maintaining the neoliberal policies which created the extreme levels of poverty and inequality she decried; Corbyn genuinely intended to dismantle those neoliberal policies. That is why the media accepted Ardern as a human face for capitalism, whilst they set out from day one to destroy Corbyn. It's why the vast majority of UK Labour MPs and party staffers, who had been committed to the incrementalist politics of Blairism prior to 2015, were viscerally opposed to Corbyn. Ardern, who had worked as an adviser in Tony Blair’s Cabinet Office in 2006, was fully accepted by the NZ Labour Party machine.

So how did such wildly different figures with such wildly different politics produce such similar election results?

The Politics of Hope

Both Ardern and Corbyn represented the politics of hope. For Ardern, that hope was mostly rhetorical; for Corbyn, the hope of change was very real for millions of workers. Either way, the hope they inspired was what created the dramatic election upsets of 2017.

Whilst Ardern left Labour’s unambitious, neoliberal-lite policies intact, Corbyn led his campaign with radical policies. Labour's manifesto was leaked to the hostile media by the Blairites in the party days before Corbyn’s official launch — and the effect this had was the complete opposite of what was intended.

Corbyn’s detractors managed to accidentally get people focussed on his radical agenda more than they would have during a normal election campaign. Voters who wouldn’t usually have paid attention were curious to hear what was contained within the document maliciously branded as “the longest suicide note in history.” They liked what they saw. Increased spending on schools, hospitals, the elderly and the poor; public ownership of vital utilities; all funded by higher taxes which would only affect the 5% richest people in the country. Better rights for workers; real action on climate change; state investment after years of miserable austerity. A future for the many, not the few. It was electrifying.

Once people saw Corbyn on the campaign trail, they realised that he was not the terrorist supporting Stalinist the tabloids desperately tried to portray him as. He was the first British political leader in decades who ordinary people could trust, because he genuinely had the best interests of workers and the poor at heart instead of caring only for the super-rich. Thus, Labour went from 17.4% behind the Tories in April to 2.4% behind on 8 June.

Both leaders appealed to young people in a way that previous Labour leaders had not. The surge in support for both Ardern and Corbyn came from youth who were angered by issues such as extreme inequality, climate change and housing unaffordability.

Another comparison between the two is how they both responded with empathy to terrorist attacks. On 22 May 2017, a British Muslim suicide bomber killed 23 people at a concert in Manchester. Instead of responding to this horrific atrocity with the Islamophobic scapegoating that has been standard in British politics for decades, Corbyn showed humanity and thoughtfulness. A lifelong campaigner against racism and war, Corbyn condemned the idea that any one person represented the views of their entire religious group, and pointed to the western foreign policy interventions in the Middle East that had led to the rise of extremism in the region.

This went against the dominant narrative to such an extent that Corbyn’s enemies in Labour, the Conservatives and the media thought that their moment of triumph had come; that this was the end of his political career once and for all. Yet mere hours after Corbyn’s brave, crucial speech, opinion polls showed that the majority of the British public agreed with his views. The warmongers who had led Britain into Iraq and Afghanistan were humiliated; Corbyn, the former President of the Stop the War Coalition that had been founded to oppose those very conflicts, was vindicated.

NZ’s biggest ever terrorist atrocity occurred during Ardern’s tenure as Prime Minister. A white supremacist gunman attacked two mosques, murdering 51 people. Ardern responded to these obscene acts with empathy, and, like Corbyn, she stood firm against Islamophobia. Ardern greeted grieving families wearing a hijab as a sign of respect, and declared of the Muslim community in Aotearoa:

“They are us. The person who has perpetuated this violence against us is not. They have no place in New Zealand. There is no place in New Zealand for such acts of extreme and unprecedented violence, which it is clear this act was.”

Whatever their differences, the hope and empathy they represented was an inspiration to millions.

Was Ardern a Success and Corbyn a Failure?

Conventional wisdom tells us that Ardern will go down in history as a successful and popular Prime Minister, whilst Corbyn will go down in history as a pariah who in 2019 led his party to its worst defeat since 1935. But that is only because Ardern’s 2017 election campaign was salvaged at the last by the MMP electoral system and the whim of Winston Peters, whilst Corbyn’s even more groundbreaking 2017 election campaign has been unfairly erased from history.

The UK general election on 12 December 2019 was dominated by the issue of Brexit — Britain’s departure from the European Union, as voted for by a margin of 52-48% in a highly polarising referendum in 2016. Brexit was always going to be an electoral nightmare for any Labour leader.

Labour was the party whose voters were most evenly split on Brexit. 68% of Labour voters opposed Brexit, yet 61% of Labour-held constituencies voted Leave in 2016. That didn’t matter so much in 2017, as many voters were tired at that stage of arguing about Brexit, and instead wanted to hear about the vision Corbyn had for changing Britain. Corbyn pledged to respect the referendum result and implement an EU exit deal which upheld workers’ rights and environmental protections. This compromise successfully avoided the Brexit question tearing the party apart.

Unfortunately for Corbyn, the hung parliament created by the 2017 election result caused a political deadlock, and meant that the question of Brexit became the only issue that mattered over the course of the next two-and-a-half years. By 2019, Labour members, influenced by a campaign from the anti-Corbyn wing of the party, had voted to change Labour’s policy from respecting the 2016 vote to demanding a second referendum. This contrasted sharply with Boris Johnson’s simple promise to “Get Brexit Done.”

2.6 million Labour voters abandoned the party, particularly across the Leave-voting north of England. Since that fateful day in 2019, Corbyn’s legacy has been portrayed by many as causing “the worst election result in Labour’s history.”

It’s not actually true. Labour won 32.2% of the vote — a better result than right-wing Labour leaders won in the 1987, 2010 and 2015 elections. 2019 was Labour’s worst result since 1935 in terms of seats — which is another result of Britain’s undemocratic first-past-the-post electoral system skewing the results.

Corbyn’s real legacy is the remarkable 2017 election campaign. 2017 represents Labour’s best election result in the last 22 years — and adjusted for turnout, it was the party’s best result this century. All despite hostility from the media, Labour MPs, and Labour staffers. It was built on the back of radical policies which represented hope to millions.

Ardern’s legacy, on the other hand, is one of a failure to genuinely transform Aotearoa. She squandered her opportunity to deliver the transformative change she promised, and made hopelessly inadequate progress on poverty and climate change. Meanwhile, inequality and housing unaffordability actually got worse under her government.

Which Type of Leader Do We Need?

Ardern and Corbyn were both right to campaign for transformative change. Neoliberalism has failed all but the wealthiest citizens of our planet. In times of crisis such as the ones we live in, only bold, radical leadership can face down the interests of the super-rich and improve the lives of ordinary people. Corbyn is the type of leader that both Britain and Aotearoa needs.

Many will argue that Ardern’s approach is better regardless, because she won. But that obscures two truths.

In the right circumstances, Corbyn’s radical politics are not only popular, but more popular than Ardern’s charismatic centrism. The comparison between the two 2017 election campaigns proves this. Corbyn won a higher share of the vote against obstacles which were orders of magnitude more difficult than those Ardern faced. 2019 was unrepresentative, a Brexit-related anomaly; 2017 proves that Corbynism can win.

Even were this not the case, it is simply not worth it to elect leaders like Ardern. Tinkering around the edges for a few years only to hand the reins of power back to conservatives who will make bold changes in the other direction results in the political spectrum moving slowly but steadily to the right. Inequality only gets worse; the poor only suffer more; and we are so nearly out of time to mitigate the worst effects of catastrophic climate disaster. What’s more, voters get disillusioned with endless disappointments from Labour. We need an end to the cycle of moderate Labour governments followed by conservative governments with less qualms about using the power they are given.

If the left stands up and challenges the wealthy establishment, we will face utterly ferocious opposition. That opposition will be well-funded, well-organised, and will turn even elements of our own side against us. But it is the only path worth pursuing. We can no longer deny that transformative change is needed; that the era of the free market must end; that climate catastrophe must be prevented before it’s too late; and that radical policies are needed to bring about this new order. In the words of Martin Luther King — “This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilising drug of gradualism.”

Ardern and Corbyn have both been replaced with managerial figures who do not even pretend to believe in transformative change. NZ’s new Prime Minister Chris Hipkins and Britain’s Prime-Minister-to-be Keir Starmer are even more concerned with appealing to the “centre ground” than Ardern was, and don’t even pretend they want to live in a significantly different society to the one we live in today.

But a better world is possible. Both Corbyn’s remarkable 2017 election campaign, and the resonance of Ardern’s message of hope, empathy and transformative change, prove that it is popular. The left in Aotearoa and the UK need to stand up and fight for that better world. For a future for the many, not the few.

Elliot Crossan is a socialist writer and activist. You can read his writing at Watermelon Media