Can Zack Polanski turn the Green Party poll surge into votes?

Zack Polanski, the new-ish leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, has a problem: such has been the recent surge in his party’s membership that it is having to book bigger rooms for meetings. The party has also just registered its highest poll rating in decades, at 17 per cent, on the verge of overtaking Labour and the Conservatives. Indeed, given the usual polling margin of error, it may already have done so.

What explains this remarkable trend, and where are the Greens going?

Membership of the Greens has overtaken that of the Lib Dems and the Conservatives, and their support has risen from the 6.4 per cent recorded at the last election to the late teens in current polling.

For many years, Caroline Lucas was the Greens’ sole representative in the Commons; now, the party has four MPs and some 800 councillors. On current polling, they might win as many as 42 seats in the Commons if a general election were held tomorrow.

Almost. Although lost to history, the Greens managed to score 15 per cent of the UK vote in the European parliament elections of 1989, largely as a result of the collapse of the Liberal Democrats’ forerunner parties as a viable protest vote. They also scored sufficient support under Scotland’s proportional voting system to take roles in the Scottish government between 2021 and 2024. And of course, their German sibling has been a member of various administrations there since 1998.

One obvious factor has to be the unpopularity of Labour and the travails of the Starmer administration. The Liberal Democrats are more centre-left than soft-left as an alternative to Labour. And the new Corbyn-Sultana grouping, Your Party, isn’t yet fully established.

All that said, Polanski has emerged as one of the more charismatic politicians of our time – adept at short-form videos, podcasts and social media – and easily holds his own in media interviews.

He is defiant, and no longer fazed by questions over his claim 12 years ago that he could increase women’s breast sizes by hypnosis (for which he has repeatedly apologised). He is proving a highly attractive figurehead for many former Labour members and supporters frustrated by what they see as the timidity and incompetence of the Starmer government. In particular, he’s shifted his party’s policy offering from traditional Green concerns such as endangered species and climate change to a wider agenda based on social justice and inequality. He talks the Labour dissidents’ language; no surprise he was once a leading light in the “Theatre of the Oppressed” troupe. And he may be a socialist, but he’s wisely avoided getting dragged into the Corbyn-Sultana psycho-drama.

More or less. Like Reform, they offer “strong meat” to disillusioned voters, and Polanski seems thus far to share Nigel Farage’s populist touch. Less encouragingly, the Greens are equally light on convincing detail to back up their radical prescriptions.

If what’s happened in European politics is any guide, the traditional two “main parties”, Labour and the Conservatives, won’t disappear, and nor will the Liberal Democrats, but they’ll be increasingly vulnerable to competition on their left and right flanks respectively. Without getting too overexcited, it’s even possible to dimly imagine an eventual realignment and polarisation of optics so that Polanski and Farage eventually emerge as the two main competitors for No 10.

Anything could happen under the current multi-party system (including a recovering SNP and resurgent Plaid Cymru), but the Westminster voting system will squeeze voters into choosing between Starmer and Farage; in such circumstances, some Green voters will hold their noses and vote Labour. Polanski isn’t even an MP yet (he serves on the London Assembly), but in a few years, he might be running a department of state. A long way to go yet, mind.

This article was amended on 24 November 2025. It previously inaccurately stated that the Green Party has more members than the Labour Party.