The Man Leading the Green Party Surge in Britain

By David Wallace-Wells

Imagine, for a moment, a political system much like ours, drawing on many of the same traditions and powered by familiar left-right energies. Now imagine that over the last decade or so, first one of its major parties imploded while in office, and then the other, taking over, tanked as well. Now imagine that one big winner of this crackup is a left-populist environmentalist party, which has surged in polling and tripled in membership since a change in leadership last September.

That imaginary land is Britain, and that left-populist party is the Greens under 43-year-old Zack Polanski, who has refocused the party’s message on affordability and economic inequality and the cruelty and fecklessness of the country’s two longstanding mainstream alternatives — both of which now look like shells of their former selves. Last August, I took a look at the state of British politics and saw a possible warning about what might happen on this side of the........

© The New York Times