Zack Polanski has been crowned leader of the Green Party after a long summer campaign of which, at times, it seemed was more about Jeremy Corbyn, than what the future of an independent Green Party might look like.
He’s offering a brand of eco-populism that will move the party away from following European greens with more centrist politics with green characteristics, and more towards a conventionally left politics, with green characteristics.
This may, or may not, prove in time to be a good idea. It seems to be the settled will of the Green Party membership. As a veteran of Labour’s own member (and registered supporter) driven push to the hard left though, there are two questions that spring out of that experience that may be relevant to Mr Polanski.
The first, is what will his MPs think of this? Zack is notably not an MP and did not stand in the 2024 general election – holding a role in the London Assembly from which he apparently could not resign.
At the most basic level, battle hardened MPs will have reservations about taking orders from a relative civilian. The Greens, of course, have a legacy of non-MP leaders, but then there was a pragmatic reason for this. Now that there are more MPs how they feel about this model of leadership remains to be seen.
Harder to know for sure is what these MPs really feel about the eco-populist shift, having come up through a very different sort of Green party. You have a spectrum of political and personal routes that are more or less congruous with populism, diligent work in councils alongside extra-democratic campaigning, charities, lots of charity employment and a smattering of the private sector. None of which automatically screams ‘problem’ but cultures inside Parties are subtle things. Many things can be overlooked if the sense is the party is moving in a winning direction of course, which leads onto the next question.
Who will actually vote for eco-populism, or more pertinently, where will they?
The Greens currently hold
Eco-populism may prove to have a broader appeal than looks currently possible, but it is hard to see the formerly Conservative parts of this constituency sticking with the Greens should they, go hard culturally into the left. The policy might not even change much, but a change of tone could be quite toxic in those latter two places.
In a way, the selection of Zack is a repudiation by the members of a strategy of going after soft Tory seats. Members want Gaza, rather than farmers, at the centre of Green politics going forward. And there are seats, as we saw in 2024, where this could pay dividends.
There were 40 seats where the Greens came second in 2024, 39 of them held by Labour (and one by the speaker). The 10 most marginal of these are:
They are pretty much all either in cities or large towns, and 45% of them are in London. None of them seem, based on the last election, massively vulnerable. The average majority is 14,126 and the lowest belongs to Harpreet Uppal in Huddersfield, on 4,533. For context this is Labour’s 112th largest majority.
To be fair, there are not masses of seats held by the Tories where the Greens are anything like second. The most vulnerable based on the last election is Tonbridge, held by Tom Tugendhat where they got circa 7k votes to his circa 20k.
Eco-populism then, is likely to work best in the cities, and the greens are strongest in the cities. Aside from giving the lie to the claim that the Greens are the ‘answer to Reform’ (as made at today’s press conference), they are simply not playing on the same pitch, the question for Zack is whether it will be popular enough to unseat the Labour incumbents. It is hard to tell whether the surprise losses (like Leicester South) in 2024 illustrate the vulnerability of Labour seats, or if they mark the shedding of the most ‘gettable’ seats already, due to the Gaza crisis.
The meta question, for progressive alliance advocates is whether this internecine contest on the left, is really what they want? Are left parties that have no interest in most of the country, useful contributors to this alliance? An increasingly urgent question as we now have two of them.
