Zack Polanski's "eco-populist" surge

On September 19, 2015, Zack Polanski was pictured at Bournemouth, giving a speech at the Liberal Democrats Autumn conference. Today, he leads a movement that has overtaken the party in the polls and in sheer membership numbers. Indeed, in just over a decade, Polanski has undertaken quite a political journey - from being at the fringes of an emotionally scarred and electorally battered Liberal Democrat party, with post-traumatic government disorder, to being at the helm of a “surging” movement. An “eco-populist” movement, to use the words of the new leader.

Just before the 2017 General Election, the party, rather squeezed by a more ‘radical’ Labour leadership, was polling at ~2%. Today, it’s reached 15%. Not only that, but it’s gained more than 30,000 members in roughly a month and has quadrupled its size in the Commons (albeit from only a single MP).

However, arguably, most of these triumphs, like their increasing membership size, have come after Polanski’s landslide victory in the Green Party leadership contest. Announced on a chilly September afternoon, Polanski won ~85% of the vote. Yes, 85% of the vote. He didn't just win though, or “beat” his incumbent opponents - Ellie Chowns and Adrian Ramsay - he trounced them. He secured an eyewatering result and a clear mandate for “bold politics”.

But this idea, the idea of “eco-populism”, the idea that the Greens should harness the widespread anger in this country and channel it into a sense of hope and renewal, is somewhat different depending on who you ask. Mothin Ali, Co-Deputy leader of the Greens, believes it’s about tackling the issues which affect the lives of the working class the most, rather than simply focusing on “climate change”, which he argues is a “luxury problem”. However, Polanski believes it’s about tone, something he mentioned quite a lot during the leadership election; he believes it’s about “taking the fight to Labour”, linking the climate crisis to rising bills and to a growing gap between ‘the 99% and the 1%’, where a select few “earn more money in their sleep” than the majority do in a year. He wants to paint a picture, or, in other words, wield the skills of “storytelling” which he attributes as a reason for ReformUK’s rise. But he doesn’t want to use it to, in his words, “lie”, or to paraphrase, to ‘degrade the lives of migrants who contribute a great load to this country’. No. He wants to use it to be popular for the reasons he believes an “eco-populist movement” should be popular: because it rallies for a “green new deal”, a “wealth tax”, “universal basic income”, etc.

Nevertheless, these not-so-heated quarrels don’t seem to matter to the new Green party leader. Instead, he wants to fight based on, according to him, a “common cause”, where people “don’t have to agree on everything”. Perhaps this underplays the difference between the leaders, most exemplified by Mothin Ali’s more socially conservative views clashing with Polanski’s pro-trans ideology, where women can have male genitalia and where men can compete in women’s sports if they identify otherwise; yet, perhaps it shows how these differences don’t matter whatsoever. Perhaps this idea to “[take] the fight to Labour” is more important, and more crucial to winning seats, than ideological bickering.

Indeed, Polanski has a bright electoral picture for the party, where they can win “30 or 40 seats at the next election”. Whilst this would be a night and day difference between the 1 MP they had for 14 long years, or the 4 MPs they have today, and their electoral tomorrow, this isn’t entirely implausible. It may take more than just hard graft; in fact, Polanski’s more radical tone, like his retort to ReformUK as a “fascist movement”, may actually help the party. If you’re Labour or the Conservatives, if you want to win a majority of seats, there’s somewhat unanimous agreement amongst many political commentators that you need to move towards the centre to attract broad appeal across the country. However, Polanski is no Jo Swinson. It seems, based on most of his recent media appearances, like his recent interview with Piers Morgan, he doesn’t expect to be the next Prime Minister (even if he hastily dodges the question - unable to properly answer it). Instead, his more radical tone may push the debate - the Overton window - to the left, especially on issues such as migration, where in the past 14 months, it seems as if Labour and the Conservatives have tried to out Reform the ReformUK party, with the latter party’s leader pledging to leave the ECHR to deport up to 750,000 migrants within five years, and the former’s calling Britain an “island of strangers”.

But even so, despite all the “quirks” with our first-past-the-post electoral system, where a party can win a majority of seats with a minority of the vote (just take a look at the 2024 General Election as an example - Labour won roughly 2/3 of the seats with 1/3 of the vote), electoral success is still possible. The Liberal Democrats themselves proved this in 2024, making way more efficient use of their resources, tactically targeting seats and converting sceptical voters into avid supporters in a way that meant votes weren’t stockpiled in safe seats, and wasted in marginals. This is why, with their 12% of the vote in 2024, they got roughly 11% of the seats, the least disproportionate result for the party, and their most successful result since the Liberal-SDP merger.

However, electoral success for the Greens will rely on efficiency, as Polanski himself has admitted. Targeting the 39 seats they were second in, behind Labour, but also focusing on other, less urban areas. But not stockpiling votes - because it won’t do the Greens any good - in terms of their size in Parliament at least - if they pick up 10-15% of the vote but gain less than a handful of seats.

Either way however, if they are able to maintain their current polling position, or advance even further, they could be an incredible threat to the Labour party. Given that many of their seats were won on small majorities, due in large part to vote splitting between the Conservatives and Reform, the “loveless landslide” they currently have is quite frail. Thus, the Greens could be a huge threat if they are to be an effective electoral force, because, in marginal seats with majorities less than a few percent, like Northwest Cambridgeshire, each vote counts and genuinely matters.

Especially if more people stray away from Labour to ReformUK due to an ever increasing dissatisfaction with how they’re dealing with issues such as the cost of living crisis, and the “migration crisis” (as indicated by YouGov’s latest MRP poll), vote splitting on the left may prove to create a “double whammy” effect where Labour are, and will continue to lose votes on both the right of the party, and the left of it.

Questions still loom though, so claims with any hint of certainty over the UK’s changing electoral landscape would prove to be immensely foolish. With a new party being formed (or at least trying to be formed) by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, suspicions still fester over whether or not the vote on the left will be split, or whether there will be an electoral pact of sorts between the parties. Although Polanski has said the party “is open” to a pact and forming a united “Green left”, there are still many, many questions to be answered on the other end of this equation - by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana.

If there’s one thing to be certain of though, the Greens are, as ReformUK chairman Zia Yusuf has put it, “surging right now”.