They say parties get the leaders they deserve. Enter stage left: Zack Polanski. The man the crank left has been waiting for. The Green Party frontman whose unstoppable rise this year has proven beyond doubt that ‘progressive’ politics is now officially braindead, lost to cringe, vibes and every terrible idea under the Sun.

With Labour PM Keir Starmer firmly in left-wingers’ bad books for being insufficiently deranged, that slice of the electorate who loathe Israel, who think men should be allowed to illegally enter both the country and women’s bathrooms as they please, who think there is nothing wrong with the economy that more wind farms won’t fix, were holding out for a hero. And boy did they get one.

The Green Party has long produced what you might charitably call colourful characters. David Icke was once its spokesman, everyone’s favourite Hereford United goalkeeper turned conspiracy theorist, who thinks the ruling class is awash with shapeshifting reptilian aliens. Zack sits somewhere in that fine tradition. In a previous life as a hypnotherapist, he claimed he could boost the size of women’s breasts through the power of suggestion, earning him a write-up in the Sun and the eternal nickname, Hypnotits.

But beyond that, his views are no more wacky than you would expect from someone who thinks of themselves firmly on the left today. Which is to say, they are still pretty damn wacky. Had you asked the striking miners in the Eighties if it was possible to punch a woman in the balls, they’d have laughed you off the picket line. Polanski not only thinks it is possible, he also chastised Graham Linehan for joking about doing so – in an X post that led to Linehan’s arrest in September.

Polanski was the only major party leader who sided with the cops in that particularly sinister speech arrest, when comedy writer turned gender-critical warrior Linehan was handcuffed by armed police at Heathrow, accused of inciting violence with his spicy trans-sceptical tweets. So, in the (we pray) unlikely event we end up with PM Polanski, we can expect safe-space authoritarianism on steroids. To paraphrase George Orwell, imagine a Birkenstock stamping on a human face, forever… while your cup size mysteriously expands, exponentially.

Polanski, 43, is very much a millennial – in the worst possible sense of the word. He represents all that has made those of us born between 1981 and 1996 ashamed of our generation. There’s the prudish authoritarianism, the identity politics, the self-righteous preening – the grimly defining features of a cohort who spent their university years trying to get redtops banned from the campus Co-op before taking their babyish offence-taking into the workplace. He recently appeared on stage with thirtysomething hipster-rap duo Rizzle Kicks, where Polanski proceeded to chant a number of things ‘we are not down with’ to a whooping crowd, including ‘racism’ and ‘fascism’, as if these things were wildly popular among other, less-enlightened sections of society. This is what politics now is to middle-class millennial graduates – a never-ending chorus of ‘Look at me, I’m a hero! And everyone else is scum!’

Polanski’s more excitable critics on the right call him a communist, a subversive radical. To be honest, this flatters him. His ascent confirms the left no longer aspires to be a revolutionary challenge to capitalism, a project of liberating mankind from class exploitation. It’s now just a make-work scheme for the moralising middle classes. Hence, Polanski’s Christmas Day message, in which he called for more ‘compassion, kindness and humanity’ towards illegal migrants. Of course there’s nothing kind about an asylum system that is so broken it is incapable of weeding out dangerous criminals, giving rapists, murderers and terrorists a fresh start on our shores at the expense of our own citizens’ safety. But this isn’t really about the issue, or even about the migrants, it’s about them; about bourgeois dogooders feeling the glow of magnanimity and distinguishing themselves from the imagined bigoted masses.

Polanski’s economic programme, such as it is, is by turns economically illiterate and depressingly low in its horizons. He appears to be an adherent of modern monetary theory (MMT) – the barmy notion that we can simply money-print our way to a ‘fairer’ society, the memory of Weimar be damned. It is a comforting fantasy to a green ‘left’ that has become implacably opposed to what it calls ‘endless economic growth’, otherwise known as the engine of higher living standards – of a better life for all. Under Polanski-ism, it won’t just be the super-rich who will have to put up with less, but everyone – lumbered with expensive and unreliable energy, with less freedom to live, travel and consume as we please. Our aspirations for more must be managed so as to appease The Planet. We are an awful long way from the rallying cry of Sylvia Pankhurst: ‘Socialism means plenty for all. We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity, but of abundance… We do not call for limitation of births, for penurious thrift, and self-denial. We call for a great production that will supply all, and more than all the people can consume.’

Polanski calls himself an ‘eco-populist’. But this is a contradiction in terms. There is nothing populist about environmentalism. In demanding Net Zero By Next Tuesday, he is happy to impoverish ordinary people to make the green, comfortably off classes feel good about themselves. Plus, he seems to think that sovereignty, borders and Brexit – the issues that have motored the populist revolt – are ‘distractions’ from the real threat: THE BILLIONAIRES. In truth, he has more in common with ‘the one per cent’ than he realises. The capitalist class loathes national sovereignty, has become hooked on cheap imported labour, and fought tooth and nail against Brexit – judging, rightly, that a Leave vote would tip the scales in the interests of the working class.

Perhaps ideological coherence is too much to ask of Polanski, whose journey into politics reveals a man motivated not by principle or conviction or learning, but a thirst for the limelight and to be seen as a Good Person. He originally wanted to be an actor, cutting his teeth (so to speak) in ‘immersive’ theatre. He joined the Liberal Democrats in 2015, at the tailend of the Con-Lib coalition government – strange timing, you might think, for ‘anti-austerity’ Zack. Maybe it was the party’s infamous penchant for karaoke that first attracted him. (He once treated Lib Dem conference to an ear-drum-busting performance of ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’, in which a goateed, off-key Polanski appeared to be channelling not so much Marvin Gaye as David Brent.) Polanski joined the Green Party in 2017, began running around with Extinction Rebellion, and was elected to the London Assembly in 2021.

Essentially, he’s a party leader who got into politics all of five minutes ago, and it shows. He was treated to the traditional softsoap interviews after he was elected Green leader in September, winning by a landslide. But he’s already begun to come unstuck. Polanski made an arse of himself on Question Time recently, when he said we need immigration because ‘I don’t particularly want to wipe someone’s bum’ – nodding to the fact that the woefully undervalued care sector is reliant on migration because it pays so poorly. What would Zack and his mates do without this imported serf class to tend to their ailing relatives for a pittance? Apparently, exploiting cheap labour is left-wing now.

Then, what all involved presumed would be a cordial, circle-jerk of an appearance on The Rest Is Politics podcast turned into a humiliation, as Polanski couldn’t tell a bemused Rory Stewart the difference between the debt and the deficit, or how much we’re paying in debt interest. He also named a series of non-economists among his favourite economists. According to Stewart, Polanski complained the exchange was ‘unfair’ after the mics were turned off, insisting he was just an actor and he would have boned up on the numbers had he been warned in advance. A millennial whinge if ever there was one.

Polanski represents the triumph of the millennial theatre kids on the left. Like mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in New York, himself a failed rapper, here is a politician whose amdram background lends itself perfectly to an age in which performing virtue on social media is what passes for politics. An era in which someone can call themselves an ‘activist’ because they make TikToks about ‘fatphobia’ all the livelong day. It’s vibes all the way down. Zack just takes it to its cringiest, most insipid conclusion. Compassion, kindness, humanity. Live, Laugh, Love! This isn’t radical politics. It’s moral peacocking for disoriented, identitarian ‘progressives’.

The gaffe-prone Polanski has certainly brought some gaiety to the nation this year, largely unintentionally. But this resurgent Green Party – well over 10 per cent in the polls for the first time in its history and now boasting 180,000 members – can’t just be laughed off. Certainly not by Labour, to whom the Greens pose a real challenge in the university towns and big cities – the citadels of Corbynism which are beginning to turn to Polanski, now that Starmer has failed to meet already low expectations and Corbyn’s Your Party has descended into deliciously predictable infighting. The social base of Corbynism – the horny-handed sons and daughters of graphic designers; downwardly mobile, asset-free, but time-rich – didn’t just disappear after 2019. Now Polanski is poised to claim them, speaking both to their more legitimate economic grievances and their thoroughly illegitimate and bigoted politics.

They are no more bigoted than on the issue of Israel. In an alternate universe, Hamas’s genocidal pogrom on 7 October 2023 would have forced the reflexively ‘pro-Palestine’ left to revisit its hostility to Israel and apologism for Islamism. To recognise that when jihadist scum Hamas said all those times that it wanted to murder Jews, it meant it. To the modern left’s eternal discredit, the opposite happened. Leftists doubled down, even if it meant denying atrocities and demonising the victims. And a depressing part of this rejuvenated Green Party’s success has been its willingness to preach to the Israelophobic choir. At the last election, before Polanski’s leadership, the Greens had to disavow a number of candidates accused of anti-Semitic social-media posts. One of them praised a ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstration that disrupted a Holocaust remembrance march… at Auschwitz. Naturally, such controversies didn’t stop the Greens from clocking up their most successful result ever, nabbing four MPs.

Polanski (who is himself Jewish) is implacably anti-Israel, gladly mouthing the vicious libel that its war against Hamas is actually a ‘genocide’. To be fair to him, he’s hardly a full-fat Hamas apologist. Less careful is his co-deputy leader, Mothin Ali, elected alongside him in September. You might remember Ali as the Leeds councillor who shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ at his count in the May 2024 local elections. It later emerged he had put out a video, on 7 October, saying Palestinians had the right to ‘fight back’. An investigation was launched, but he wasn’t suspended. (Ali later claimed he was only talking about the right of a people to resist in principle, in international law, not Hamas’s targeting of civilians.)

Ali also led a smear campaign against a local rabbi who was called up to serve in the IDF following 7 October. He called the rabbi an ‘animal’ who ‘went from Leeds to Israel to kill children and women and everyone else over there’. Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch was bombarded by death threats and advised by police to move his family out of the city. When Polanski, Mr Compassion, was grilled on Ali’s comments, he essentially echoed them: ‘I think if someone goes to fight with an army that’s committing a genocide then there are consequences.’

These are the two sides to Zack Polanski. He is at once utterly trivial, a Hallmark-card sloganeer posing as a serious politician, and yet he is indulging some of the most reactionary ideas – and people – imaginable. He is the walking, talking, grinning embodiment of the modern left’s inoperable brain rot. Let’s make 2026 the year we wipe the smiles off those insufferably smug faces.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_