The Z factor: Why New York Zohran and Green Zack need to be taken seriously

Progressive Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York mayoral election is not just ‘Trump’s worst nightmare’, it’s a wake-up call for Labour and Reform – they need to watch out for Zack Polanski and his Green Party in the UK, writes Sean O’Grady

He’s young, digitally savvy, charismatic, pro-LGBT+, and bearded. Progressive, radical, a constant irritation and challenge to the political establishment, it’s more than tempting to imagine Zack Polanski as the British counterpart to Zohran Mamdani, the newly elected mayor of New York.

Both are obviously busy men, but if they could find time in their diaries – maybe on the fringes of some COP-style environmental conference or a pro-Palestine rally – they would find that Zohran and Zack have more than superficialities in common. Mamdami has been described as “Trump’s worst nightmare”. In the UK, the rise of the Green Party, at the expense of a demoralised and disillusioned Labour government, at least suggests that Polanski is a bit of a bad dream for Keir Starmer, too.

One key to Mamdani’s success is purely generational. At 34, he speaks for, and is part of a generation that has borne the costs of a capitalist society and enjoyed fewer of the benefits enjoyed by previous cohorts, notably the boomers. He lives in a modest apartment and understands his fellow New Yorkers’ struggles to make ends meet in a city that has become financially uninhabitable for many. He campaigned and won on a platform of “affordability”, pledging to scrap bus fares, introduce city-run grocery stores, implement rent controls, double the minimum wage, and free childcare – all paid for by the rich, including raising business taxes. More or less, that could all easily form the basis of a Polanski Green Party manifesto.

‘It is no coincidence that Zack Polanski is becoming to Nigel Farage what Zohran Mamdani is to Donald Trump – a bogeyman to be portrayed as a threat to civilisation itself’ (BBC/Getty)

These are policies that aren’t just anathema to Trump, but to a cautious Democratic Party run by an older generation that’s grown out of touch and which has been left bewildered by digital media. There’s Andrew Cuomo, whom Mamdani beat in New York, running as an independent after legacy sexual assault complaints, but also the likes of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and, of course, Joe Biden himself. Kamala Harris was only ever going to be a partial antidote to them and a bridge to a new generation.

You can detect the same dynamic, albeit in a different party structure, developing on the more radical elements of the hard left in Britain. At 42, Polanski strikes a contrast to Starmer (intellectually older than he is chronologically at 63), but also Zarah Sultana, 32, supplanting Jeremy Corbyn, an energetic 76-year-old who, in parallel with Bernie Sanders across the Atlantic, has had his day to be a potential national leader.

Unlike Mamdani, Polanski has no powerful geographical base outside his seat on the London Assembly. Still, his proven ability to “cut through” with similarly “red-green” populist messages, his skill at using podcasts and social media and his status as a national party leader mean that he too has suddenly broken through to be a formidable force at the highest level. A little like Ken Livingstone and Tony Benn did for a previous generation, and Corbyn to an extent, Polanski is defiant in interviews. He knows his case and is a superb debater. He doesn’t take any nonsense, and the deeply personal, demonising and trivialising attacks by what he’d undoubtedly think of as the capitalist media only serve to confirm his belief in what he’s doing.

The treatment of Mamdani in the New York Post during this election, depicting him as a manic, terrifying Marxist socialist wielding a hammer and sickle among the skyscrapers, is a reasonable indicator of his level of support in the media. No matter. Like Polanski, he is not afraid of the press in the way that the likes of Starmer and Biden are. And it is no coincidence that Polanski is becoming to Nigel Farage what Mamdani is to Donald Trump – a bogeyman to be portrayed through a distorting mirror as unpatriotic, dangerous and a threat to civilisation itself.

Could Polanski ever “do a Mamdani” over here? Well, ably assisted by a maladroit Labour leadership, he has tripled support for the Green Party since the election. If some of the polls and the wilder speculation are correct, in a few years, he could end up as the leader of the opposition to a Reform UK government led by Farage.

I’d not bet on that particular outcome, but politics is becoming ever more volatile. Like Mamdani, Polanski will have to be taken seriously.