Zohran Mamdani won New York City's mayoral election, facing Islamophobic attacks from right-wing figures. Photo / Getty Images
Some of Zohran Mamdani’s detractors want you to believe his rise accelerates a clash of civilisations.
In the build-up to New York City’s mayoral election – which Mamdani won , today according to Associated Press projections – prominent United States right-wingers, including President Donald Trump, tarred the 34-year-old democratic socialist as a supposed “jihadist”, a “Jew-hater”, and even a cheerleader of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 (when Mamdani was barely 10).
In their eyes, Mamdani’s Indian-Ugandan origins were suspect, and his part Muslim background a threat.
Rather than debate a political rival, a number of Republican lawmakers have sought to find ways to denaturalise and deport Mamdani.
But in the eyes of many in the Big Apple, Mamdani is the consummate New Yorker.
His social media has conveyed an authenticity and connection to the city unmatched by other mayoral challengers.
His emphasis on the city’s affordability crisis saw a surge in voter registrations among a young electorate hungry for change.
His effortless cosmopolitanism – including ads in a variety of languages – activated previously neglected communities in one of the world’s most diverse cities.
Even as Mamdani kept his focus on issues relevant to working-class New Yorkers, he also never shrank from the national conversation.
“We are in a period of political darkness: Donald Trump and his Ice agents are snatching our immigrant neighbours from our city right before our eyes,” he said at a pre-election event.
“His authoritarian administration is waging a scorched-earth campaign of retribution against any who dared oppose him.”
When bombarded by blatant Islamophobic attacks and vitriol, Mamdani gave a powerful address about the experience of living with bigotry in the US and the need to reject it.
He stood by his long record of pro-Palestinian activism, while distancing himself from some of the excesses of activist rhetoric.
And he pledged that, as mayor, he would “deploy hundreds of lawyers” to resist Trump’s federal over-reach and protect the city’s most vulnerable populations.
The clash that Mamdani’s victory sets up is not one of civilisations.
Rather, it’s of competing visions of the world – one anchored in Trump’s angry nationalist project and the other in Mamdani’s global city.
In the former, non-citizens risk detention and deportation for acts of speech. In the latter, a precocious former rapper who’s arguably more at home in Kampala than Kansas can emerge as the leader of America’s greatest metropolis.
Mamdani also finds himself at the tip of the spear of a broader trend. Across the world, liberal mayors of major cities find themselves at odds with the nationalist politics of their hinterlands.
That tension has grown all the more acute at a moment of ascendant far-right populism in the West.
Mayors represent constituencies that are inherently more diverse and multicultural than the nations within which they sit, and they recognise how essential that diversity is to the dynamism of their cities.
Femke Halsema, the left-leaning mayor of Amsterdam, warned of “the looming collapse of a very civilised democratic order” in her country because of polarisation spurred by the far right and mounting attacks on minorities.
“A democratic society protects its minorities,” she said in August. “Freedoms are first taken away from minorities.” A centrist party narrowly defeated the Dutch far-right in general elections last week.
Gergely Karacsony, the liberal mayor of Budapest, sees it as his daily task to resist or counteract measures taken by Hungary’s illiberal nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
“When the government targets civil society, we co-operate with those organisations. When it attacks the independent press, we stand in solidarity with journalists,” Karacsony told me earlier this year.
“We also demonstrate the limits of the government’s power – by using political and legal tools to resist the financial strangulation of our city,” he added.
“We are trying to set an example and offer a model to prove that politics can – and should – be grounded in moral principles and guided by ethical goals.”
Mamdani will undoubtedly find himself locked in similar battles with Trump in the coming months.
As a guide, he may seek inspiration in the longevity and resilience of London Mayor Sadiq Khan, another Muslim politician of South Asian origin.
On the election trail, both Mamdani’s and Khan’s opponents conjured hysterical visions of the politicians as extremist jihadists, even as the candidates themselves were far more interested in touting their connections and commitments to the economic concerns of working-class Londoners and New Yorkers.
Most Democratic Party insiders in New York have disregarded Trump’s description of Mamdani as a “communist”, with some even characterising him as a “progressive capitalist”, willing to engage more moderate colleagues and business and tech leaders.
Khan, who is a more centrist politician in substance and style than Mamdani, has shepherded London through the shocks of Brexit and the pandemic, often at odds with a Tory government and, more recently, as the rhetorical punching bag of Britain’s ascendant far-right Reform UK party.
“We’re in a moment of populist, far-right uprising in both countries. And the centre-left has had the stuffing knocked out of them,” Matthew McGregor, the chief executive of 38 Degrees, a progressive London-based think-tank, told the New York Times.
And yet, he said, “Sadiq and Zohran are unusual and inspiring in a way in which they are seeking to use the power of their respective cities to drive progress forward”.
In Europe, other politicians on the left are taking notice and rallying around Mamdani, in whose rise they seek inspiration to revive their own sagging fortunes.
Former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn hosted a phone bank this past weekend in support of Mamdani’s bid, touting their shared love for Arsenal Football Club in North London.
Manon Aubry, a French politician who leads a bloc of leftist factions in the European Parliament, canvassed alongside Mamdani supporters, cheering the “hope for a radical change” that he embodies.
David Belliard, the Greens’ candidate for mayor of Paris, told Politico in an interview that Mamdani’s campaign has shifted the aperture for parties like his that have run less populist campaigns in the past.
“We’ve spent a lot of time fighting against the end of the world, but maybe not enough helping people make it to the end of the month,” he said.
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