Zack Polanski elected Green Party’s first Jewish leader

In May this year, he denied that the Labour Party was “rife with antisemitism” under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

"Jeremy Corbyn at the time was talking about pockets of antisemitism within the Labour Party,” he told Novara Media.

Polanski stood as a local candidate for the Lib Dems in 2015, before joining the Greens in 2017. He was elected to the London Assembly in 2021 and as Green deputy leader the following year.

Before politics, he worked as an actor with an immersive theatre company and as a hypnotherapist. The latter role saw him embroiled in controversy in 2013 when he told a Sun reporter that he could help her enlarge her breasts through hypnosis, for which he has since apologised.

Meanwhile, the election saw Mothin Ali and Rachel Millward elected as Polanski’s deputy leaders, despite Ali’s history of controversies over Gaza.

Elected as a Leeds councillor last year, he defended the right of “indigenous people to fight back” after October 7, while, on the day of the attack, he wrote on X: “White supremacist European settler colonialism must end.”

And, following his local election victory last year, he was filmed dedicating his win to “the people of Gaza” and shouting “allahu akbar”.

He also faced criticism from Green activists during the deputy leadership campaign after failing to submit responses to a list of pledges sent out by the LGBTQIA+ Greens group. All other candidates for the role responded committing themselves to the pledges.

Ali said he had been sent pledges from multiple Green groups, but decided against signing any of them “not because I don’t support their causes, but because I wanted my messages to come directly from me, ideally sitting down in conversation, and not via third parties”.

"I believe the ‘pledge’ system runs a risk of undermining our internal democratic processes. I did get this message to one of the groups in advance, but I recognise that my communication on this could have been better,” he added.