The Green Party's singing sensation

'Coalition' perform as part of the Green Party's Party Political Broadcast

Forming a boy band of politicians with a catchy tune seems to have gained serious attention for the Green Party - while also providing fodder to their opponents.

Their first party political broadcast for the general election, released today, starts soberly enough, with a woman speaking straight into camera about how the Green Party are an alternative to the other mainstream parties in England and Wales. But then she says: "there is only one party that stands by its beliefs, while all the other parties seem so similar, it's like they're in - harmony," and suddenly a spoof boy band appears. It's called "Coalition" and is made up of impersonators of David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage, who burst into song. Over the next two and a half minutes the singers suggest that all the leaders are in a "political party harmony."

It was members of the Green Party's youth movement who started to push the video on social media before it aired on television. Leader Natalie Bennett then retweeted the link to the video shared by the relatively obscure Twitter account of the City of Coventry Young Greens (the account only has 16 followers and has only sent 12 tweets). She released a statement explaining the video: "for many years the Establishment parties have been singing from the same hymn sheet ... the Green Party is offering a real alternative to business-as-usual politics."

Within three hours the hashtag #changethetune and the accompanying YouTube link was tweeted almost 3,000 times and generated over 300 comments on YouTube. It's unclear how many times it's been viewed - when a video suddenly takes off, YouTube often freezes the view counter at "301+" views while its engineers manually check that the sudden interest in the video isn't being faked by computer programmes. However the same video on the Green Party's Facebook page was viewed more than 72,000 times over the same period.

This is not the first time that singing politicians have struck a chord with the public. A video of Nick Clegg's own version of "Uptown Funk" had over 310,000 views in over a week.

Online, many liked the Green Party's video but others - especially from other parties - saw an opportunity to mock them. "The Greens have been working on this for SIX MONTHS! SIX! MONTHS! And at no point did they think it was a bad idea!" tweeted the editor of the Labour List blog, Mark Ferguson. "It's like they had a good idea & it was a good idea for 10 seconds, but then they forgot why they were doing it," tweeted Tim Stanley of the Daily Telegraph.

But the most common comment across YouTube, Facebook and Twitter seemed to be people asking whether "Coalition" were available to appear in this year's Eurovision song contest. Handily the Greens have made the s lyrics public should anyone - supporter or opponent - want to sing or spoof the song at karaoke.

Reporting by Hannah Henderson

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