Until a few months ago, most voters couldn’t have picked Zack Polanski out of a line-up. Now, the Green Party leader – who was elected in September – is so mobbed by crowds, he travels with a bodyguard, said Ailbhe Rea in The New Statesman. He gets stopped by teenagers in the street, and at the club nights he hosts, people cheer his name. It is strikingly “reminiscent of the Corbyn mania of 2017”. His life has been transformed, and his party has been too. His message, mixing hope with a “heavy dash” of left-wing populism, has gone down a storm.
The party’s membership has grown from 80,000, when he became leader, to more than 226,000. The Greens won their first by-election in February, and are now on course to make big gains in next week’s local elections in England.
Equal threat
Keir Starmer has long been alive to the threat posed by Reform UK, said Chloe Chaplain in The i Paper – and in response, Labour has shifted to the right in some areas. But there is a growing realisation that the Greens pose an equal threat.
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Reform is still expected to win the biggest vote share on Thursday, but by focusing on issues such as Gaza (where it accuses Labour of being complicit in a genocide) and “affordability”, the Green Party has won over many ethnic minority voters, young progressives and Corbynistas. In London, the party is set to win four councils – including Hackney and Lambeth – that have been Labour-run for decades.
Yet Polanski’s brand of Corbynism is risky, said Daisy Eastlake in The Times. Several of his candidates have been exposed for “incendiary views” (one shared a video saying that a synagogue attack was “not antisemitism” but “revenge”); and he has caused alarm by suggesting that British Jews might be experiencing a “perception of unsafety”, not real danger.
Riding high
Have the people planning to vote Green any idea of the chaos the party would wreak, wondered Danny Cohen in The Telegraph. As well as legalising hard drugs and reducing income inequality by enforcing a maximum 10:1 pay ratio for organisations, it wants to remove many barriers to immigration.
Polanski is riding high now, but soon he will come up against the challenges facing Reform UK, said John Rentoul in The Independent – including novice councillors who struggle to get the basics right, let alone deliver on their “impossible” campaign promises; and national policies that are treasured by members but unpopular with the broader electorate. Polanski might be pragmatic enough to drop these, but there is a problem: in the Green Party, it is the members who decide policy.