Thanks to a new proportional voting system and an increase in the number of constituencies for the May 2026 Senedd election, polls show a predicted 11% of the vote-share for Plaid Werdd or Wales Green Party. With an increase in membership, from 3000 to 8000, Welsh Greens have had the chance to offer a full slate of candidates across their nation. As a result, it is expected that 10 Green MSs could get elected to serve their country.
This will mark a historic breakthrough for Welsh Greens who have struggled to make their mark. It will also reveal a unique and welcomed ecological voice which has remained mostly hidden behind a dominant and populist Green Party of England.
The Scottish Greens Party split from the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW) in 1990. It suspended amicable ties with the GPEW in 2022 over concerns about transphobia. Eco- populist and transgender champion Zack Polanski has been busy mending bridges since elected Leader of the GPEW in September 2025.
To understand the unintended, but de facto exclusion of Plaid Werdd’s unique green voice for such a long time requires illuminating the role of former deputy leader Amelia Helen Womack. Holding her combined role as Leader of the Wales Green Party and that of the GPEW’s deputy leadership – as stipulated in the GPEW’s constitution – Ms Womack reigned supreme in Plaid Werdd for 8 long years (2014-2022).
Followers to The Green Light blog may recall that we traced back the ‘capture’ of the GPEW by post-modernist identinarians to the year 2016 with the adoption of motion C4 ‘Recognising Trans Identities’ proposed by Tavistock patient and transgender Aimee Challenor. This was the pivotal motion which categorically declared that “The Green Party recognises that Trans Men are Men, Trans Women are Women, and that non-binary identities exist and are valid”.
In 2021, following the resignation of co-leaders Jonathan Bartley and Sian Berry due to public statements about trans rights, deputy leader Womack stood for the leadership of the GPEW. She picked Young Greens self- identified trans non-binary Tamsin Omond (they/them ) as her running mate.
Offering a “young intersectional feminist leadership” their bid was deemed to have passed the constitutional test for co-leaders to be of different genders. This is because the 2016 C4 motion had in effect ratified the ideological concept that sex and gender are the same.
In spite of her popularity and much sympathy from ‘ordinary’ natal women members because of her tragic story of domestic abuse, in addition to support from the LGBTIQT+ and the Young Greens, the Womack/Omond ticket failed to deliver. They came second with 3,902 votes or 38,3% of the vote share. Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsway were elected as co-leaders with 6,273 votes or 61.7% of the vote share. ‘Gender critical’ Dr Shahrar Ali came third with 21% of the vote.
Senedd decisions cover Energy, Environmental governance, the Economy, Council Tax, Housing, Health, Transport, Education and Culture. As evidenced in their 32 pages long Senedd Manifesto 2026, would-be green MS will seek “to create clear legally enforceable goals to protect wildlife, and ensure every government decision supports climate and nature recovery”.
In their response to the Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales, semi-autonomous Wales Green Party makes it clear that its perspective was “informed by the dependence of all our societies upon the living biosphere and climate of Earth”.
Predicting that the climate, biodiversity and inequalities crises in Wales will get worse, the response highlighted the need for governance to pay attention to the need for local and national resilience and wellbeing. Equally important was that in planned improvements, future generations would not be betrayed and “all policies should use the best available science”
Whilst sharing nationalist Plaid Cymru’s long term ambition for Wales to become independent – as well as much of its anti-poverty progressive agenda – and judging by the fact that at the launch of their Manifesto, no reference to ‘eco- populism’, ‘intersectionality feminism’, transgender, non-binary, Gaza or even Zionism was made, Welsh Greens are clearly in the process of distancing themselves from the GPEW’s dominant anti-science post-modernist identity politics agenda.
When Plaid Werdd will formally cut its umbilical cord to the GPEW is difficult to say. However, judging by Leader Anthony Slaughter’s excrutiating embarrassment in his response a to a straight question from a member of the public about women’s rights to single sex spaces on 15th April at a BBC Wales hustings, his members will no doubt wish the sooner the cut off from the mothership, the better.
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