Exclusive: Green Party Leader Zack Polanski On Why 2026 Will Be The Year Of Hope

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I have only been leader of the Green Party since September and it’s been busy! I have given hundreds of interviews and been travelling around the country. This means I’ve answered lots of questions to both national and local journalists.

However, my answers to these questions, though important, are not what I believe has made the enormous impact we have seen in the past few months. It is about hope. While the other parties trade blows, their message is one fundamentally of there is nothing you can do to change the world we live in. If you try, frankly, you’re “nuts” – as Sir Keir Starmer put it.

Make hope normal again has caught on because it speaks a simple truth that people feel. It is economic and it is personal. People feel helpless to enact change.

Deep inequality, the climate crisis and the world’s “forever” wars, are all out of our control. It is just the way it is. Perpetual inertia is how our elites want us to feel. Because it means no change.

We have a mental health epidemic, in the main because of a cost of living crisis that has become endemic into almost every part of our lives. Meanwhile, AI and lives increasingly led online are breaking down our social environment and  communities.

Politicians encourage further despair with their race to the bottom rhetoric. I have been showing in my first few months as leader that there is a positive case for immigration. Celebrating our differences and coming together makes us all richer.

Hope is catching. Believing that there can be a better way will echo through everything we do and say in 2026. It doesn’t need to be the case that there is a cost of living crisis for ordinary working people while the world’s richest 25 families are $360 billion richer than they were a year ago.

Politicians from the other parties say it has to be this way. It doesn’t and this is what giving people hope is about. 

There is an alternative.

The Green Party is setting out to give hope and inspiration to people from all backgrounds, classes and ages.

However, it is not surprising that our widest appeal is currently among younger people.

And while our support spans across all ages, this is the generation which has lost out like no other in the neoliberal age where the protection of people with assets has come before everything. Unaffordable housing, precarious employment, low wages, student debt have hit the youngest the hardest.

Young people tell me that they have little optimism about the future.

A mother wrote to me recently and told me that her teenage son has been in deep despair about his future, believing he doesn’t have one, until he heard the Green Party and myself talking about hope and setting out an alternative.

Her son has now joined the Green Party so he can be part of change.

His mother told me that “we haven’t just brought hope.” She said, “In my house, you have brought change.”

This personal story is what inspires me. There is an alternative. Real change is coming. And hope is at its heart.