Zack Polanski, the new leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, has been making headlines for his combative style and willingness to ‘take on’ political opponents head-on. He has spoken of the need to challenge Labour’s timidity, of confronting Nigel Farage on his own turf, and of learning from the communication techniques that have helped populists break through into mainstream debate.
For some, this is refreshing: finally, a Green leader willing to speak plainly, show passion, and fight for attention in a crowded political marketplace. For others, it raises a more uncomfortable question: what happens to our democracy when leaders on the left adopt the rhetorical playbook pioneered by Bannon, Farage, and Trump?
The populist style
Steve Bannon once described his strategy as “flooding the zone with shit”. The goal was not persuasion but saturation: overwhelm the public sphere with noise, spectacle, and outrage so that truth itself loses authority. Populist politics thrives on this ecology of distraction.
Some of the key techniques are well known:
- Us vs them framing: defining political identity by constructing enemies, whether ‘elites’, ‘globalists’, or ‘woke’ activists.
- Moral simplification: presenting complex issues in stark binaries of good and bad.
- Spectacle and virality: treating politics as theatre, optimised for clips and clicks rather than argument and evidence.
- Urgency and anger: framing the moment as a last chance to act, often amplifying grievance and resentment.
What is striking in Polanski’s early leadership is that he appears to use these methods. His recent campaign appearances in Clacton, filming conversations with Farage’s constituents for social media, are textbook populist performance. He packages voter conversations into viral clips, casting himself as the plain-speaking outsider willing to take the fight directly to the doorstep.
He has also been forthright in attacking Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, framing them not as potential allies but as morally compromised, too timid, too complicit in neoliberal systems. Internally, this style has already drawn criticism from fellow Greens, who warn that it risks alienating moderates and shrinking the party’s broader appeal.
The risks of populism
Why does this matter? Because democracy is not just about winning votes. It is about sustaining the norms and practices that make genuine disagreement possible. When politicians, even with the best of intentions, borrow from the populist playbook, they risk eroding those very norms.
1. Shrinking space for deliberation
If politics is conducted in the language of moral enemies rather than political opponents, the space for compromise and persuasion collapses. Rivals become targets, not interlocutors.
2. Tribal loyalty over critical engagement
Populist tactics encourage followers to rally around the leader, often discouraging dissent or nuance within the movement itself. Loyalty becomes a badge of identity, not a matter of reasoned support.
3. Alienating the middle
A polarising style can galvanise a base but risks pushing away those voters who are undecided, cautious, or ambivalent. For a party like the Greens, who must reach beyond activists to win parliamentary seats, this is a strategic hazard.
4. Eroding democratic patience
Democracy requires slow work: deliberation, institution-building, incremental change. Populism thrives on crisis and spectacle, rewarding those who can provoke and polarise. That accelerant corrodes the patience democracy needs to endure.
The temptation of the Greens
The irony is that the Greens, and other progressive parties, justify adopting populist tactics on pragmatic grounds. ‘If it worked for Farage, why not us?’ they ask. The argument is that one must ‘fight fire with fire’.
But this is precisely the danger. By learning from Farage, the Greens risk becoming more like him in form, even if utterly different in content. And in politics, form matters. A democracy shaped by perpetual outrage and binary framing cannot easily sustain pluralism, however noble the cause. If we pick fights and make enemies now we will build a future full of fights and enemies.
It is worth recalling that Farage’s greatest victories were cultural rather than electoral. He shifted the terms of debate, bending institutions and larger parties around his agenda. If the Greens replicate his methods, they may also bend the public sphere, but towards the same style of politics that corrodes democratic trust.
An alternative path
None of this is to say that the Greens, or any progressive movement, should retreat into technocratic jargon or polite irrelevance. Anger at injustice is real. Urgency on the climate crisis is necessary. Plain speaking is welcome.
The question is whether these can be expressed in a way that deepens democracy rather than undermines it. That might mean:
- Framing through solidarity, not division: highlighting the interdependence of communities rather than pitting groups against each other.
- Valuing plurality: making space for internal dissent and dialogue rather than narrowing the movement around one leader’s voice.
- Building institutions of care: using urgency not to bypass process but to create new forums, citizens’ assemblies, participatory budgeting, neighbourhood dialogues, where people can deliberate together.
- Practising humility: acknowledging complexity and uncertainty, resisting the temptation to present every issue in moral absolutes.
In other words, progressives need a politics of passion with restraint, of clarity without caricature.
Is Zack Polanski right?
Polanski is right that the Greens must find new ways to break through. But if the way forward is simply to borrow the populist playbook, the risks to democracy are profound. Politics reduced to spectacle, moral binaries, and viral clips may bring attention in the short term, but it hollows out the very practices that sustain democratic life.
If the Greens are to offer an alternative to politics as usual, they must resist the temptation to imitate Farage and Trump in style, even while opposing them in substance. What our democracy needs is not more outrage, but more listening. Not more enemies, but more neighbours. Not another populism, but a politics of care.
