LONDON — Less than four months after being elected leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski, is fast emerging as Britain’s most prominent Jewish politician — and the standard-bearer for the country’s newly energized radical left.

Young, gay and vegan, Polanski, 43, is snapping at the governing Labour party’s heels in the polls, his ascent fueled by a Zohran Mamdani-like cocktail of promises to soak the rich and expand the government, married to an anti-Israel, identity politics agenda.

“I take huge inspiration from Mamdani,” Polanski proudly declared after the election of New York’s new mayor.

Polanski’s rise has stymied the launch of Jeremy Corbyn’s new far-left party, which has been riven by infighting between allies of the disgraced former Labour leader.

And the Greens’ ascent is increasing pressure on Prime Minister Keir Starmer to tack to the left to stem the bleeding of its supporters to Polanski’s party.

Amid a dizzying array of U-turns, anemic economic growth and soaring taxes, and talk of a leadership challenge to Starmer, Labour’s support has sunk in the polls. The Conservatives’ historic defeat last July means they remain in the doghouse in many voters’ eyes. Instead, led by Nigel Farage — a populist libertarian who led the successful campaign for Brexit — the insurgent right-wing Reform UK is making the political weather.

But while Farage mops up disenchanted Tories and chips away at Labour’s traditional working-class support in the “red wall” constituencies of the north of England, Polanski is winning the backing of younger voters, especially in the UK’s left-leaning big cities.

A former actor-turned-hypnotherapist, Polanski defected from the centrist Liberal Democrats to the Greens in 2017. He was subsequently elected to the London Assembly, to which the capital’s mayor is answerable, and elected Green Party deputy leader. This summer, he campaigned for the top job, using his successful run for the party’s leadership to cast himself as the anti-Farage, while promoting an approach he dubs “eco populism.”

Polanski’s strategy makes good electoral sense. At the last general election, the Greens came in second for 40 parliamentary seats; all of them are held by Labour and most in the party’s urban, graduate-heavy strongholds, including London, Manchester, Leeds and Merseyside.

If not entirely absent, the Greens’ traditional pitch on climate change has been relegated to the backseat. In its place, Polanski has adopted a message which combines class warfare and ultra-progressivism, arguing: “There is no environmental justice without racial, social and economic justice.”

Wealth and inequality, not climate change, were the centrepiece of his address to the Green Party’s annual conference in October. Claiming that the UK is a country where “a tiny few have taken our power, our wealth,” he declared it is “time to take it back,” by introducing a wealth tax on the “super rich” and ending the “failed experiment” of privatization. The Greens want to nationalize the utility companies, establish a state-owned housebuilder and cap high salaries. “We don’t need to tax and spend,” Polanski told the BBC in September. “We need to spend and tax.”

At a time when public concern about immigration tops the polls, Polanski is “unapologetically very pro-migration.” And, placing himself front and center of Britain’s culture wars, he described the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling this spring, which defined women by their biological sex rather than their........

© The Times of Israel