Exclusive: New Hackney mayor Zoë Garbett speaks to the Citizen following victory

Hackney’s new mayor, Zoë Garbett. Photograph: supplied

Green party mayor of Hackney Zoë Garbett sat down for an exclusive interview with the Citizen following her victory.

“I’m just so grateful for how many people have got behind me; the Greens; our manifesto”, she said. “I think it really shows that people have looked for an alternative and they’ve seen what we’re offering in terms of hope for Hackney.”

Garbett won the mayoralty in a landslide election, winning by a margin of almost 10,000 votes. The Greens secured 46.88 per cent of the vote – amounting to 35,720 ballots – whilst Labour fell to 35.26 per cent.

With today’s victory Garbett overturned a historic Labour stronghold with the mayor of the borough being held by the party since the position’s inception in 2002.

Hackney Council has had a plurality of Labour councillors since 1971, although this could change by the end of the count today.

“We’re at a scale we’ve never been at before in Hackney,” Garbett told the Citizen. “I’m hopeful that we’ll see more councillors elected.

“We got two elected in 2022, we won a byelection in 24 and we’ve had a defection. So there’s four of us out of 57 at the moment, so I’m hopeful we’ll definitely see an increase.

“There’s some incredible candidates out there, so I’d really love to see as many of them elected as possible.”

Garbett’s election comes against the backdrop of disappointing results across the country for the Labour party.

At the time of writing, Labour have lost 471 councillors across the UK, with many more predicted until the end of the day. Meanwhile, Reform UK have made huge gains in councils across the country, including the London Borough of Havering. 

Speaking immediately following the declaration in Hackney, Green party leader Zack Polanski declared “the two party system is dead and it is buried.”

Garbett agreed: “Residents said time and time again on the doorstep that they just felt let down.

“Whether that was the national government and the failings that they can see, or just, you know, the outrage that they felt –  attacking disabled people, complicity in a genocide in Gaza, changes to immigration policy.”

However, she maintained that the result today was a vote for the Greens and not a vote against Labour as some analysts have suggested.

“People think really carefully about who they vote for, and we have many conversations with people on the doorstep to really show people what we’re about”, she told the Citizen. 

“They’ve seen us working hard across the borough, so I think they were definitely getting behind the vision that we were presenting.

The Greens have had to work so hard for our votes and to project our values. I definitely think people have been frustrated and feel let down and were looking for an alternative. So I definitely feel like it’s a vote that they were voting for.”

Note: this article was updated at 21:05 on Friday 8 May 2026 with additional interview material.