LONDON — Zack Polanski’s Green Party is still feeling the heat from a controversial policy branding Zionism a form of racism. But the outfit’s intense focus on internal democracy is making it hard to move on.
Polanski has sought to challenge Britain’s governing Labour Party from the left since he swept to the top last year. But he fell short in a recent by-election test, failing to get a seat in the U.K. parliament after a race dominated by internal Green bickering over the party conference motion.
The motion has triggered a wave of internal soul-searching — and last week saw the collapse of several local government deals with Labour, which has spent years stamping out any hint of softness on antisemitism.
The leader has since sought to regain the initiative — promising an overhaul of party democracy which aims to give its upper echelons more responsibility in setting the Greens’ strategic direction.
But that’s already testing the limits of his role in a Green Party constitution that’s meant to put members in the driving seat.
POLITICO spoke to 10 Green Party officials past and present to try and map out the difficulties Polanski will now face. Some were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive internal party matters.
They painted a picture of a party caught between parliamentary representatives who want to shut down what they see as a vulnerability — and a rank-and-file membership keen to defend the right to set binding policy. Some described a leadership caught in a bind — heeding concerns from MPs while wanting to avoid over-riding party structures.
“The rules that are written were meant to avoid flip-flopping,” said Doug Rouxel, former deputy chair of the Green Party’s executive committee (GPEX).
“If we effectively decide every motion can be revisited, we will have to repeatedly debate motions over and over, any contentious issue where people are uncomfortable at the position we arrive at,” he said. “It’s about the general principle of undoing.”
In a bind
Polanski has made the Greens’ opposition to Israel’s post-October 7 campaign in the Gaza Strip a key selling point of his leftist force, tapping in to disillusionment with Labour.
But the party’s stance on the Middle East was thrust into the spotlight in October when its annual conference passed a motion — backed by just 0.4% of the party’s overall membership — taking aim at Zionism as an ideology. It defined Zionism as supporting “an ethnonationalist Jewish state.” Party members also backed a “single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine.”
The blowback in SW1 was swift. The party’s Westminster leader, MP Ellie Chowns, said the Greens need to make sure they are not “vulnerable to capture by extremists and racists.” The Equalities and Human Rights Commission, an official watchdog, wrote to the party after receiving complaints about possible discrimination. The chair of the Jewish Greens called on Polanski to resign.
Green members of parliament who believe the motion is a mistake are already trying to work out how they can U-turn on or amend it.
That’s easier said than done, and people familiar with the party’s internal governance have told POLITICO doing so could be near-impossible.
Under the Green Party’s constitution, members cannot bring forward a motion or amendment that “significantly amends” a policy for two years after it is voted through.
The people who decide whether this criteria is met are the five members of the Standing Orders Committee — a group which acts as the “Supreme Court” of the party, as described by one previous member. Of the current membership of this body, three are backed by Greens for Palestine, which proposed the successful motion.
“Not a single one” of the committee would allow a motion or amendment to the Zionism is racism motion be put forward, the former SOC member said. A members’ ballot — where all Green Party members could vote on re-litigating the motion — would also have to pass the same test. “There’s simply no way round it,” they added. “It is cast-iron.”
Faced with that dilemma, Polanski has discussed reform — but only in general terms.
Party leaders issued a joint statement in October saying that a structural update was needed to deal with the Greens’ ballooned membership. It has grown from roughly 60,000 to more than 200,000 under Polanski’s leadership.
“This will be an iterative process with the first stage of improvements expected to be brought for a vote at Spring Conference and a delivery plan in place for longer term actions,” the statement from party leaders read.
A Green Party spokesperson insisted this was not a direct response to the Zionism row. “The party has long needed to consider how members can engage effectively, and with membership at a record level, that work is now a priority,” they added.
Polanski meanwhile told the BBC in October that he would not seek to overturn the motion himself — and that he would not be able to even if he wanted to.
Polanski’s current stance — making amendments to the motion at the first available opportunity in 2028 — remains unchanged, a Green Party official told POLITICO. They stressed that his support for governance changes is geared towards a long-overdue rule update rather than this specific policy.
But Green MPs hope to use the pressure of public interventions to get results sooner. Adrian Ramsay, a former leader of the party, has said Polanski’s “strong communication and motivational skills” have shifted the dial on the climate and cost-of-living — and implied they could do so here.
That has, in turn, prompted pushback from defenders of the Green Party’s structure. “Some of these people wrote the job role of leader, and now they’re expecting someone to do it very differently from how they designed it,” said Rouxel, the former deputy chair of the party’s executive committee. Polanski, he said, simply does not have the power to intervene in democratic processes.
Pressing for an overhaul
MPs are forging ahead anyway. Ramsay told POLITICO the proposals set out by a working group on party governance had a “good chance” of being heard at the party’s next conference in spring.
“I’ve spoken to some of the people on the working group who are determined to do that. The bigger question is whether there can be movement on the motion itself in that time period, which is harder but essential,” he added.
This could theoretically include an attempt to change the rules around how the SOC functions so that an amendment to the Zionism is racism motion is heard sooner.
The former SOC member said, however, that it would be “a miracle” if a motion to change party governance gets heard at spring conference.
“It would brazenly be an attempt to subvert conference, and it is also boring,” they said. “Any motion that gets proposed at conference has to get prioritized by members, and historically members don’t rank governance motions highly. Essentially, it would be a miracle.”
Meanwhile, Rouxel warned that changing the processes this time would set a tricky precedent.
“If the MPs didn’t want this to be passed then they should have thought about that before conference,” Rouxel said.
“The fact they didn’t is concerning. The only way they can get what they want is organizing enough people in the [conference] room to vote for what they want — and that is what they failed to do.”
The working group on overhauling party governance — which counts Polanski and the CEO amongst its members — is not open to rank-and-file members. And that decision is already coming under fire from some quarters for not being democratic.
“They have absolutely no power to bring motions that are any different to what a member can propose,” the former SOC member said. They added that Polanski needs to “stop telling people he is going to do stuff he is not in a position to actually do.”
