Originally Posted by
BlackPeter
Look, I am not a Jacinda Ardern fan, and I never was ... though admittedly - my view of her government (and her skills to run it and to do what she promised to do) sobered up a lot during the years of her reign.
I don't think either that she is a particularly good PM (though probably the best NZ could choose at the last election ... the best out of a really bad bunch).
However - I find it absolutely wrong and pretty revolting to put her into the same category of people like e.g. Putin and Xi - authoritarians and the worst scum the human race can produce. Ardern is not an authoritarian (no matter how convoluted Mr Greenwald chooses to express this view), and she is not making authoritarian statements. Come next election - and assuming she loses (which I think there is a good chance), than I am sure, she will be gone by whatever point in time our law requires the loser of the election to. She is a democrat. Maybe not one I fully agree with, but this is the beauty of democracy - we can pick these people and we can drop them as well. Full stop.
She is a (in my view and in general) well meaning politician, who shows more and more that she is not capable to do the things she promised to do and intended to do. So, yes - call her inept, but don't call her an authoritarian.
She seems to be as well more caught in a populist and an ideological bubble than I expected - I found the xenophobe attitude of her government over the last handful of years disgusting and I found it appalling that they happily destroyed the livelihoods of thousands of migrants and other people trusting a NZ visa. She clearly did a lot to damage our reputation with people our economy now needs. But again - she followed our laws - and she is certainly not the first democratic politician trying to utilize a crisis to push as well her hidden agenda. Call her populist, call her ideologically blind sided, call her inept to do her job, call her arrogant (typically comes with power), but don't call her authoritarian.