'This is an election between the Greens and Reform', Geraldine Coggins tells me as we sit in the sunshine in front of a café in MediaCity.

Former university lecturer, author and currently leader of the Green Party in Trafford, Cllr Coggins was the first candidate to be declared for the Greater Manchester Mayoral Election. After leaving her home city of Dublin in 1997, she moved to Stretford in 2013 with her husband and three children.

She was then elected to Trafford council in 2018 becoming one of the first two Green councillors not just in the borough, but in Greater Manchester. Cllr Coggins now wants to be the first Green mayor of Greater Manchester.

For her, the message to voters is straightforward – vote Green or get Reform.

"As someone who lives here, and this is my home, I don't want to wake up at the end of July and find we have a Reform mayor," she said. "People are clearly abandoning Labour on a large scale.

"They're choosing Green, they're choosing Reform, and I think it's up to all of us to stand up against the toxic politics of Reform and make sure that, at the end of July, we are celebrating having the first ever Green mayor in Great Manchester."

Cllr Coggins points to the local elections, saying those results saw 'Green wins on an unprecedented scale' and 'massive wins for Reform'. The 'common denominator, she added, was 'overwhelming losses for Labour'.

Labour lost 108 seats when the region went to the polls in May. Reform gained 104, while the Greens increased their number of councillors by 26. The majority of the Green gains were on Manchester city council, where they took 17 of the 36 seats on offer.

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The party also came fifth in last week's Makerfield by-election, securing just 308 votes. The figures raise a question over whether the party has the necessary support in the boroughs to win the mayoral contest.

Cllr Coggins said: "What we know is that where we campaign hard, we win. You'll have seen that in Gorton and Denton. Everyone commented on the scale of the ground campaign we had there and, again, that was a fight between Green and Reform. I think that really united people."

She added: "In Makerfield, we didn't. We ran a very minimal campaign there because that was like 550th on our target list. We also knew that it was going to lead to this, and this is an election that we can win. So we didn't put the effort into [Makerfield]."

The Makerfield by-election was perhaps the most consequential by-election in UK history. Former MP for the seat Josh Simons stepped down to allow Andy Burnham a crack at a return to Parliament and, potentially, the role of Prime Minister.

The days that followed were rife with speculation over whether Sir Keir Starmer would accept the growing calls from MPs to resign from the top job. That emotional resignation came at around 9.30am today (June 22).

Cllr Coggins believes the drama around the Makerfield by-election will work in her party's favour.

She said: "We're having this election because of the Labour leadership failure and their internal psycho drama, and I think people are quite tired of that […] With 400 MPs down there, they still couldn't find even one of them who was fit to run the country.

"In all of their leadership, psycho-drama there was not one mention of potential for a female prime minister."

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The Labour Party appears to agree that the mayoral vote will be a two-horse race – they just disagree on which horses are in the running. They believe it will come down to a choice between them and Reform UK.

Over the weekend, Labour MP for Stretford and Urmston Andrew Western said: "The Greens cannot win the mayoralty. Their candidate finished fifth at the last mayoral election, and recent local election results across Greater Manchester placed them behind both Labour and Reform.

"Under the Supplementary Vote system, their support is nowhere near enough to secure victory. The choice is clear: continue Labour's record of delivering for Greater Manchester, or risk everything we've achieved."

Voters will now be asked to pick their two preferred candidates for the mayoralty. If no party achieves more than 50pc of the vote, the two candidates with the most votes will move on to a second round.

If a voter's first choice candidate is eliminated but their second choice remains, their vote will switch to that candidate. The candidate with the most votes in this round will win the election.

Cllr Coggins said she does not think the new system will hamper her chances, however, saying: "It gives people an extra chance to vote Green, but what we know is that because this is an election we can win, people don't have to think about the voting system, they can vote with their head and their heart."

So why does Cllr Coggins want to be the next mayor of Greater Manchester? In answer to this question, she recounts to me a conversation she had with a friend while out walking around a year or two ago.

"We went for a big long walk and we were putting the worlds to rights and talking about where our country is at and how worried we are about that and about the world. Towards the end, she said something like 'I'm sure they'll sort it out'.

"And I just thought: 'Who are they?' There are no grown-ups who are going to come and fix this for us."

She added: "I think a Green mayor in Manchester will send such a message to Labour. If they have lost that seat to the Green Party, they will absolutely have to listen.

"There's a lot of things the mayor can't fix. We can't bring in rent controls at the moment, we can't scrap right to buy – things that really affect everybody's day-to-day lives.

"I think having a Green mayor, having taken that seat from Labour, and calling that out over and over to our next male prime minister, that will be a really key part of the role so I can do more than what was in the remit of the mayor and the GMCA. I can be that powerful voice speaking up for Greater Manchester down to Westminster."

At a campaign launch event over the weekend, the Greens set out some of their priorities should they win the Greater Manchester office. These include 'giving the people the homes they need', creating a 'world class transport system' and getting the region's high streets 'buzzing again'.

I had hoped to dive into these further with Cllr Coggins during our 30 minute conversation to find out how these changes would be delivered, what they would look like and, in the case of housing, where they would go. However, I was told we would have to wait for the party's manifesto to be published for those answers.

Cllr Coggins said: "What we're going to have is a big, exciting manifesto coming out really, really soon. The details are going to go in there. We're finalizing things."

She added: "What I can tell you is we will be focusing on the cost of living. I knock on a lot of doors and I listen to the issues affecting people across a really wide range of places in Greater Manchester and the cost of living is just a consistent factor.

"People are struggling to make ends meet, our high streets are depressing, and as your green mayor, I'll be focusing on making it easier for people to make ends meet and actually going beyond that.

"This isn't just about barely being able to pay the bills. This is about, you know, giving people some quality of life and giving them some hope as well."

Cllr Coggins also said she wanted to create a 'city region where everybody feels welcome and everyone feels they belong' while also 'putting in the climate and nature emergency at the heart of decision-making'.

The Greater Manchester mayor is also the region's police and crime commissioner. Cllr Coggins said: "We know there's a problem of trust in the police and we know that our police need to more closely reflect the communities that they live in […]

"I think as the mayor, there will be more details in the manifesto, of course, but it would be my job to work with our police and to make them more responsive to our populations, to our communities."

When asked if she had a message for voters, Cllr Coggins said: "We need to unite and really take the fight to Reform and make sure that we have a Green mayor here at the end of July who is fighting to make this [not just] a city where people can afford to live, but where people love to live, where our differences and diversity are something that we celebrate and appreciate and that puts the climate and nature crisis at the heart of everything we do."