Westminster is no stranger to the unpredictable and fraught political procedure known as the leadership election. Across long campaigns encompassing myriad audiences, candidates voice conflicting and sometimes irreconcilable visions. Dividing lines are summarily set out and stressed as candidates vie to place themselves on the right side of party opinion. Only then do they turn to the public at large.
In this sense, the Green Party leadership contest, currently playing out ahead of a vote in August, is both familiar and unique.
The Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW) constitution mandates leadership elections every two years. But the contest scheduled for 2024 was postponed due to last year’s general election. According to party rules, candidates can either put themselves forward as individuals or as a co-leadership team of two people.
This latter point has contributed to the contest’s intriguing texture: a co-leadership ticket of Adrian Ramsay MP and Ellie Chowns MP is facing off versus Zack Polanski, who is running on a single ticket.
Since announcing his candidacy, Polanski has pointedly critiqued the Green Party’s co-leadership structure, saying: “I do think the movement needs a single figurehead… that’s about someone who can go all around the country and amplify other people’s voices.”
For a party that rarely lingers long in the media spotlight, its leadership formation could well be hampering its “cut-through”. According to recent YouGov polling, 75 per cent of voters “don’t know” what they think of Carla Denyer, the Green MP for Bristol Central; 82 per cent “don’t know” what they think of Ramsay.
Ramsay and Denyer are the party’s current co-leadership team, but the latter announced earlier this year she would not seek re-election. Polanski serves as their deputy and as an elected Member of the London Assembly (MLA). Notably, he is not an MP.
This institutional angle reflects the campaign’s prevailing dividing line. Chowns and Ramsay point to their joint records of winning seats in the House of Commons, and stress the significance of their platform in parliament as a way of spreading the Green message.
Chowns, the MP for North Herefordshire, and Ramsay, the MP for Waveney Valley, overturned Conservative majorities of 24,856 and 22,364 (notional) respectively at the 2024 general election. In comments relayed this week via press release, Chowns said that those results “proved that when we lead with hope, fairness and ambition, we can win anywhere.”
Ramsay added: “This success wasn’t an accident… It’s the result of years of hard work, discipline and strategic leadership.
“That’s what we bring — and that’s what the next phase of Green politics needs. With the era of two-party politics now clearly over, there’s everything to play for.”
May’s local elections brought about further such success, with a net gain of 44 seats. National opinion polls tend to place the party at around 8-11 per cent (up from 6.7 per cent at the general election).
Ramsay and Chowns believe that an organised Green presence could hold the “balance of power” at Westminster following the next election, which they describe as the “most consequential in a generation”.
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Polanski’s campaign has placed significantly less emphasis on his party’s institutional responsibilities at Westminster, focusing instead on the possibility of expanding the Green message as a part of a wider movement.
The MLA is running on a platform of “eco-populism”, a consciously contentious counter to climate delay and denial, with a focus on movement-building and extra-parliamentary activism. Polanski’s pitch proposes the Greens shift to the left of Labour, occupying vacant territory that he contends has not been fully exploited by the current leadership.
Announcing his candidacy in early May, Polanski told the Guardian: “We’re not visible enough. I don’t want to see our membership grow incrementally. I want to see us be a mass movement. There’s something here around eco-populism: still being absolutely based in evidence, science and data — and never losing that — but telling a really powerful story.”
Eco-populism is not Polanski’s term, though he is the first to bring it to the frontline of British politics. It embraces the political and rhetorical potency of the “pure people” vs “corrupt elite” dichotomy but casts a wider net, in the latter category, to include large corporations, institutions and individuals perceived as harmful to the environment.
In this sense, this strategy is both a strident challenge to — and an evocation of — the political style associated with Nigel Farage.
Polanski does not resile from this comparison. He claims the Green Party can learn from the Faragist right about how to cut through, organise a political narrative and tell stories to a disillusioned public.
He told the Guardian in his campaign’s inaugural interview: “People are done with the two old parties and we’re in this dangerous moment where Nigel Farage is absolutely ready to fill that vacuum…
“We should never turn into Nigel Farage. But there are things we can learn in terms of being really clear in speaking to people.”
In an interview with ITV News last week, Polanski expanded on this point. “Nigel Farage tells a really powerful story, but so often it is based on disinformation and lies”, he said. “It’s a bit like he’s playing politics on easy. He just gets to hit with people’s emotions.
“I do think we’ve got to learn from that. Not with the same politics, I despise his politics, but with the storytelling.
“It’s just all storytelling needs to be based on facts and information, and that’s really difficult. But transforming this country was never meant to be easy.”
These comments reflect those Polanski delivered in a second Guardian interview. “Far too often, the party leads from a policy and data space”, he stressed. “Our MPs, who are excellent, are a scientist, an engineer, a renewables expert and a former MEP. We don’t have storytellers. We have such a powerful story to tell.”
Polanski has campaigned as he intends to lead: with regular appearances at mass rallies and by making adroit use of social media. Online, his contributions achieve strong engagement, akin to Reform UK’s large social media presence. On this measure at least, and it is only useful in a partial sense, Polanski bests Chowns and Ramsay by some distance.
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It is also relevant that both Chowns and Ramsay unseated Conservative MPs to achieve their place in parliament. From 2021 to 2025, the success of the Denyer-Ramsay co-leadership came, in part, because the partnership represented both the party’s challenge to Labour in urban areas and the Conservatives in rural areas. Denyer unseated Labour’s Thangam Debbonaire, a former shadow cabinet minister, last July. Generally regarded as the first among equals, the Bristol MP led from the front in castigating Labour.
At the 2024 general election, the GPEW and its sister parties finished second place in 40 constituencies, 18 of which are based in London. (That leaves no shortage of seats for Polanski to run in next time around). Now, in all but one of these 40 seats, the Greens finished second to Labour.
Since the election of course, the political opportunities for the Green Party have proliferated. Polanski would argue that he is best placed, beyond parliament but firmly on the left, to exploit them.
The challenge for Chowns and Ramsay, if their leadership bid triumphs over Polanski’s, would be to balance their imperatives as national spokespersons with their constituency-facing electoral incentives. Can they simultaneously establish the Greens as a clear receptacle for progressive disenchantment, while retaining a focus on local issues in their rural seats, where the Conservatives want to begin their comeback?
The counter-argument advanced by Chowns and Ramsay is that the Greens will not be able to “outshout” Reform with populist-style messaging “but we can outshine them.”
Ramsay said this week: “We beat them by showing there’s another way — a politics rooted in community, not polarisation; in hope, not fear. Huge numbers of people rightly feel utterly let down by politics as usual.
“Reform have tapped into that anger, offering false solutions based on misinformation and scapegoating. People are crying out for a genuine alternative, real solutions, politics with integrity — and that’s what the Greens offer.”
This message was encapsulated more narrowly in a tweet Chowns posted over the weekend. Publicising an upcoming campaign event, the MP commented: “We’re not here to hold signs. We’re here to hold power.
“I’ll share why being in Westminster matters — and how we grow our influence to win bigger, faster, further.”
The post was relentlessly assailed by activists and Polanski supporters who, suffice it to say, disagree. So visceral was the backlash that it appears the very purpose of the Green Party — its soul — is at stake this election.
Polanksi would constitute a seismic rupture with the established strategy of the Greens, as prosecuted under the Denyer-Ramsay co-leadership; his politics represent both an ideological and methodological deviation. With rupture comes risk, not least of all the choice to move the party leadership beyond the bounds of Westminster. The transition from parliamentary party to quasi-pressure group — a kind of de-professionalisation — reflects, on the surface at least, a curious trajectory, even an untimely regression into protest politics as relevance beckons.
For what it’s worth, Reform UK is moving at pace in the opposite direction. Farage has even disavowed the designation of “populist”.
But in a fast-evolving political landscape, the House of Commons represents a significant but shrinking segment of the available political scenery. Farage has not delivered his most notable contributions from the (small ‘g’) green benches this parliament; his reputation for skipping the odd important debate, weaponised by his critics, has hardly dented his popularity among his target voters. Insurgent parties are platforms unto themselves. They create the stage. Polanski, who trained as an actor, has been a visible Green voice on the media for some time now.
This contest is also bigger than the Greens. It looks set to have wide consequences for the future of the British left and the nature of its resistance to a Labour government that, by most accounts, is tracking right. Polanski has hinted that he would “roll out the red carpet” for left-wing MPs such as Zarah Sultana and Clive Lewis who are critical of the government. Touted by Polanski as a potential defector, Sultana sits as an independent MP and shows little sign of wanting the Labour Party whip back — if her commentary in the commons and on social media is anything to go by. Lewis remains a Labour MP, but his messaging potentially aligns with Polanski’s “eco-populism”. Independent MP Apsana Begum is another candidate for a possible defection, according to a recent PoliticsHome report.
As for whether he would welcome former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to the Greens, Polanski told the New Statesman: “Absolutely”.
He added: “[Corbyn] got three million more votes than Keir Starmer. Every time we’re on the same platform we’re talking about the same issues”
Whatever the specifics of the Green Party’s long-term strategy, it is difficult to disguise the fact that, at this present moment, Keir Starmer shows little sign of fearing it. His march rightwards, on immigration rhetoric in particular, is informed by a cold calculation that progressive voters will return to Labour when the moment — a general election with Farage “running as prime minister” — demands. Labour strategists instinctively disbelieve the Green threat.
Put simply, Polanski wants to panic Starmer. One does not need to wait for a hung parliament to affect policy and shape the rationale of government.
Critical mass or mass movement?
The Green Party leadership election reflects some of the core divisions that characterise our political discourse more broadly. On both strategy and substance, 60,000 Green members will soon decide how they plan to oppose this Labour government — using established means and institutional avenues, or potentially more imaginative populist-style tactics.
In other words: do the Greens want a critical mass that can effectively scrutinise the government, shaping its policy in the event of a hung parliament, or a mass movement that can pummel it into submission?
Polanski’s position has attracted greater media interest because it aligns with the moment: he has cast himself as an insurgent challenging establishment arguments. Chowns and Ramsay, potentially to their detriment, have done little to actively protest this framing. But both camps think the race’s defining dividing line: establishment vs insurgency, or power vs protest (depending on one’s perspective), reflects well on them.
Later this year, the Greens must choose whether to evolve with the times, following Farage’s lead in a sense, or to go against the grain — advocating potentially outdated modes of opposition. The moment is volatile. Fundamentally, Chowns and Ramsay’s case is one of caution. But risk aversion is not an overly compelling message, especially when the contest is an internal leadership election and the target audience is the party’s activist base.
A sliding doors moment. A crossroads decision. A turning point. Pick your cliché: the Green Party’s choice, for an institution still considered “minor” in the grand scheme of British politics, will shape politics far beyond it — and potentially for many years to come.
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here.
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