Mamdani’s global city clashes with Trump’s nationalist project
Liberal mayors of major cities around the world have found themselves at odds with ascendant far-right populists. Mamdani will undoubtedly face a similar fight.
Some of Zohran Mamdani’s detractors want you to believe his rise accelerates a clash of civilizations. In the buildup to New York City’s mayoral election — which Mamdani won emphatically Tuesday night — prominent U.S. 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 Sept. 11, 2001 (when Mamdani was barely 10 years old). 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 denaturalize 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 neighbors 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 United States 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 overreach and protect the city’s most vulnerable populations.
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On Tuesday night, he spoke defiantly against Trump’s “authoritarianism” and the “oligarchic” interests backing the U.S. president. “Mamdani was what so many politicians, law firms, universities, media companies, and others have not been: totally, completely, authentically unafraid,” noted Ben Rhodes, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, on X.
The clash that Mamdani’s victory sets up is not one of civilizations. 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, noncitizens 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.
As I wrote earlier this year, Mamdani also finds himself at the tip of the spear of a broader trend. Across the world, liberal mayors of major cities end up at odds with the nationalist politics of their hinterlands. At its most extreme, you can see such a contest in the autocratic consolidation underway in Turkey, with the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan deposing and detaining Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu on trumped-up charges.
Further west, that tension between cities and states has grown more acute at a moment of ascendant far-right populism. Mayors represent constituencies that are inherently more diverse and multicultural than the nations within which they sit, and they recognize how essential that diversity is to the dynamism of their cities.
Femke Halsema, the left-leaning mayor of Amsterdam, warned of the “the looming collapse of a very civilized democratic order” in her country because of polarization 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 cooperate with those organizations. 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 pocketbook 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 characterizing 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 center 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 on less populist platforms 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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What readers are saying
Zohran Mamdani's background and political stance appear to resonate with many New Yorkers, particularly those dissatisfied with the status quo and seeking change. His campaign focused on issues affecting the majority of NYC residents, and his approach is seen as a shift towards... Show more
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