November 4th, 2025, will go down in history not only for the largest US city of New York. It will also be etched in the chronicles of the whole United States of America as a country—democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral election by a wide margin.
A central intrigue of the election was President Trump’s vigorous endorsement of Andrew Cuomo over the Republican candidate, which demonstrated the division line going along class allegiance rather than affiliation to the party lists. Moreover, a faction of New York’s oligarchy urgently raised a number of millions of dollars in an effort to boost Cuomo’s campaign.
Mamdani, a 34-year-old Muslim, hit the right note of a powerful political demand sweeping across the whole country, a widespread demand for social justice. He promised voters free-of-charge universal childcare, a free express bus network, a freeze on rent, and similar measures. This agenda comes as New York grapples with an economic crisis: up to 60% of rental units are abandoned and stand vacant, half of all public transit users evade fares, and shops are shuttering their doors amid a wave of decriminalization and shoplifting. Mamdani plans to fund his reforms by levying higher taxes on the city’s wealthiest residents.
Not only did President Trump lambast Mamdani, labeling him a “communist,” but he also threatened to slash federal funding and even deploy federal troops to the city. In his speech during a rally arranged to mark his victory, Mamdani sharply rebuked Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, declaring that “New York was built by immigrants, it thrived owing to immigrants, and now, it will be led by one”.
Mamdani: A Democratic Socialist
Mamdani, a practicing Muslim, is the son of a celebrated film director and an acclaimed scholar, himself of Indian descent from Uganda.
Like many of his staff, Mamdani belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) group, which boasts roughly 250 elected officials, including two members of Congress, dozens of state legislators, and several mayors. As reported by the Washington Post on October 6, the Democratic Socialists of America movement broke away from the Socialist International in 2017, an organization that embraces many European social-democratic parties, due to its interest in the market economy. Instead, the movement joined the São Paulo Forum, an alliance of left-wing parties from North and South America, which includes the Communist Party of Cuba, Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front, and the Socialist Party of Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro. Participants of the Forum also include the communist parties of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Uruguay.
The leftist wing of the Democratic Party played an active role in Mamdani’s campaign, in particular, with prominent support from Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative A. Ocasio-Cortez. The latter hailed the New York voting victory as a “minor revolution,” proclaiming that the time had come to “kick the thugs and bullies out of the White House.”
Israel’s The Jerusalem Post interpreted Mamdani’s election as ushering in a new era in American politics in terms of his pro-Palestinian stance. The socialist mayor’s win was met with particular enthusiasm in Tehran, given that Mamdani is not only married to a Syrian woman but also belongs to the Shia branch of Islam. Even the Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat described Mamdani’s victory as a monumental achievement for a Muslim politician who “conquered New York not by means of violence, but through democratic competition, representing Islam in its essence, not in a distorted, superficial form.”
Overall, a prevailing sentiment across the Global South is that Mamdani’s victory is not a mere fluke of local politics but part of a broader transformation: the American electorate is fundamentally rethinking who should lead, what constitutes justice, and the relevance of the old rules. Anti-systemic sentiment has moved from the fringes to the centre of power, being no longer a fleeting protest but a governing force.
Muhammad Amer, Syrian publicist
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