English Green party leader Zack Polanski tells Australian colleagues to ‘connect with anger’ to counter rightwing populism
Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green party of England and Wales, has told his counterparts in Australia that they need to start “connecting with people’s anger” and learn from the “storytelling power” of populist rightwing politics.
Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green party of England and Wales, has told his counterparts in Australia that they need to start “connecting with people’s anger” and learn from the “storytelling power” of populist rightwing politics.
Speaking via video link at the Victorian Greens campaign conference on Saturday night, Zack Polanski said the party in Australia needed to start “taking on” Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, just as his own party had taken on Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
The political right, he said, had been “very, very good at connecting to people’s anger, fuelling it, and that makes things happen quicker”.
Progressives have a responsibility not to fuel that anger, Polanski said, but they should be listening and talking about it.
“People are feeling more and more angry, more and more disillusioned – and more and more ready for change,” he said.
“I think what we’ve not necessarily been great at, as progressives though, is connecting with that anger. I think sometimes we rush to hope, we rush to solutions, so we don’t quite connect in the same way.
“But if you can recognise the pain people are feeling right now, the struggle people are feeling right now, if you can connect to that … and then be able to offer people solutions, that is so powerful,” Polanski said.
Polanski said progressives should separate the leaders of rightwing parties from those who might be considering voting for them.
“I would imagine that a lot of people who are thinking about voting for them could actually be Green voters,” he said. “They are people who are rejecting establishment politics, who want to see something different – who might have issues with some of your policies – but actually on those core messages around cost of living, around inequality, those are the things that they are worried about.”
The Green party is fresh from electoral victories in England and Wales including a historic byelection victory in February, alongside strong results for the independent Scottish Greens, but polling also indicates the once minor Reform UK is now the main party on the right. The Victorian Greens leader, Ellen Sandell, said the situation was similar in Australia, with the party grappling with how to be “the antidote to disillusionment” without “beating up” and giving air time to One Nation.
She asked Polanski how he saw the Greens’ place “in this fragmented political landscape”.
“For a long time I didn’t want to give any air time to Reform and actually just wanted to focus on our hopeful alternative,” he answered.
“There reaches a point, though – and I imagine from the way you describe One Nation, you might have reached that point already – where they are dominating the news agenda or, far too often, other political parties are constantly dancing to their tune.
“So I think it reaches a point where actually you do just need to take them on – and you need to take them on directly by being that antidote.”
Polanski said he would “never underestimate the power of hope” and that it was essential to have a plan.
But he said only talking about solutions risked coming across as unrealistic or uncaring.
“It is a little bit like when you have a friend and you are annoyed about something,” he said. “If someone immediately starts to jump to what you can do about it, sometimes it feels like they haven’t really heard you.
“Whereas if they can give you a moment to be really annoyed about something, to vent about something, to hold that space and then offer solutions together, that’s a really powerful experience – and I think it is exactly the same at the macro level in politics”.
