Conference chaos suggests the Greens need more than charismatic leadership to bring about real change

Frustrations with ‘in-fighting’ on the left are the least of our worries if the democratic processes meant to facilitate discussion can’t get off the ground.

Labour Party authoritarianism and Your Party divisions make this clear. Many have been looking to the Green Party with new hope in light of these failures, but the chaos that derailed their 2026 spring conference suggests that they are sadly not immune to anti-democratic setbacks either.

This is not what the party’s new members will have been expecting.

Green Party on the rise

Over 100,000 new members have flocked to the Green Party following the election of Zack Polanski as leader. At every turn, he has shown he does not want to repeat the mistakes of left-wing leaders past. This has clearly resonated with many voters looking for a new party to get behind after years of Labour Party betrayals.

Most significantly, Polanski has demonstrated that spurious claims of antisemitism will not stifle the Green Party’s solidarity with Palestine. In fact, he refuses to give an inch where Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party was previously beaten into submission by the Zionist lobby. Corbyn’s new venture with Zarah Sultana, Your Party, has similarly taken a tougher stance. But Polanski has distanced himself from his neighbours by pouring cold water on suggestions that he might enter into an electoral pact with him and Your Party more generally.

This distancing is no doubt part of an attempt by the Greens to steer clear of the divisions engulfing Your Party, whose members have complained about its lacklustre start. Already, splinter groups have already made moves to stand independent candidates in local elections without the express backing from the the party’s machinery. Despite promises of greater party democracy empowering members, many have become frustrated that their voices are not being heard.

Those who have joined Polanski’s Greens over Your Party no doubt believed that the Green Party was going to do things differently. Their spring conference was the perfect opportunity to test this belief against reality.

Anti-democratic disruption

Conferences are an opportunity for members of a political party to make their voices heard. When parties are newly founded or experience an influx of new members, conferences become all the more important. They are a test of the party’s internal mechanisms and provide a democratic opportunity to shape any future direction.

Unfortunately, at the inaugural Your Party conference in December 2025, the Canary ‘witnessed an undignified and embarrassing pantomime’ marked by an ‘undemocratic stain’. The Green Party’s spring conference was a chance for it to further distinguish itself from the dysfunction of its neighbours.

Central to this was a headline debate concerning the motion ‘Zionism is Racism’. Although it was not the lead motion to be heard that day, wider press coverage and consternation from Jewish Greens meant it garnered far more attention that it might have done otherwise. The right-wing press also took every excuse to exploit the motion to retry all their old smear tactics.

As a result, the debate and subsequent vote was highly anticipated, but opposition to it almost derailed the conference as a whole. The conference had barely begun when the Canary reported that its voting system had crashed, following a suspected ‘DDoS attack‘.

Things did not improve later in the day. Multiple votes of no confidence were levied against the party chair – including over concerns ‘regarding the security of internal democracy’. The Canary‘s Maddison Wheeldon summarised that ‘sabotage or delay tactics have clearly been at play in the Greens today’.

Charismatic leadership only goes so far

This is not a minor issue.

Polanski may be a figurehead galvanising energy around a left-wing political party that seems to have its act together, but charismatic leadership only goes so far. If conference is a testing ground to see if new front-facing energy is reflected behind the scenes, many have been left disappointed to find the same problems undermining the Green Party as have undermined Labour in the past and Your Party in the present.

The picture painted of the Green Party’s new energy was very different last year. Back in October 2025 at The World Transformed, the Canary‘s Antifabot reported that Polanski was the very embodiment of the festival’s grassroots energy and atmosphere. At its heart, this energy was driven by an understanding of the fact that any:

‘top-down’ approach of governing doesn’t just need dismantling within our political parties, but also within the very core of our movement and its grassroots mechanisms.

Five months on, it appears that some sections of the Green Party have missed the memo. If they cannot govern from the top, they will disrupt from below. In practice, this amounts to undermining democracy in ways we have come to expect from Labour.

Many within the Green Party were uncomfortable with having their dirty laundry aired in public, with some lambasting the Canary for its coverage in particular. That is to be expected. But without greater transparency and accountability for its failures, the Greens run the risk of repeating all of the mistakes that its leadership has worked hard to avoid. The British left has long deserved better, not just from its leadership, but from its party bureaucracies as well.

Featured image via the Canary