Over the past five years the New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, garnered admirers around the world with her signature mixture of empathy and strength – qualities that helped steer her country through natural disasters, a pandemic and the Christchurch mosque shooting. However, to Ardern’s critics, her soaring rhetoric was not always backed by desired legislative reforms.The Guardians’s Aotearoa New Zealand correspondent Tess McClure speaks to Laura Murphy-Oates about Ardern’s shock resignation and the legacy she leaves behind