Until Zack Polanski’s election the Greens rarely featured in mainstream political debate. They were stagnant in the polls and had two obscure co-leaders. Now, they average 15 per cent and could win a by-election for the first time in Gorton and Denton (where Andy Burnham was out campaigning for Labour yesterday).
But greater prominence has brought greater scrutiny. That’s a lesson Polanski is learning fast. His interview with Channel 4 News yesterday was perhaps the best example yet. Asked whether he still favoured abolishing Nato, Polanski replied that he instead wanted to “reform it from within”.
What would that look like? We didn’t get the chance to find out because Polanski soon made it clear that he regards Nato as unreformable. “I don’t think it’s possible because 86 per cent of our arms imports come from the United States,” he said, while also chiding Donald Trump for being “unpredictable” and “not a reliable ally”. He went on to advocate for an alternative security alliance comprising Europe, Mexico and Brazil to look at “how we stop American imperialism, and also conversations about China and indeed Russia too”.
If that seems incoherent that’s because it is. Polanski found himself caught between the radical left argument that Nato is an agent of US imperialism and the liberal concern that Trump will abandon the alliance (the popularity of which has, unsurprisingly, surged in Europe since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine).
You might ask whether this matters for an “eco-populist” party, but it does if the Greens are to achieve their ambition of replacing Labour as the country’s main left-wing force. As the YouGov poll below shows, defence is by far the party’s weakest issue: 57 per cent of voters do not trust the Greens, compared to just 17 per cent who do.
The Greens are facing a version of the same dilemma that confronted their German sister party. Having traditionally rejected Nato membership the latter eventually embraced it after entering government for the first time in 1998 and backing intervention in Kosovo. The SNP similarly voted in 2012 to abandon its 30-year opposition to Nato and now says an independent Scotland would be a “non-nuclear member”, “just like Denmark and Norway”.
So here’s a prediction: if the Greens want to be taken seriously as a potential party of government they will need to make the same journey. If they don’t, Polanski will only find that his incoherence on defence becomes an even bigger problem.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: Can the Greens win Gorton and Denton?]
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