From hope and hunger strikes to City Hall: The rise of Zohran Mamdani

It was February 2020.

At the time, I read of a young man named Zohran Mamdani, running for an assembly seat in Astoria, Queens. 

I thought the name sounded familiar and it wasn’t long before the penny dropped and it became obvious that he was the son of the Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani – whom many of us had read to better understand the so-called War on Terror – and famed director Mira Nair – whom many of us had admired for her intimate socio-cultural commentaries.

Curious, I wrote to his campaign team and asked if I could have a call with him. 

As someone with a background similar to my own, being of South Asian origin from the African continent, Mamdani felt like a familiar figure.

Whereas it’s widely known he was born in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, and had lived for a time in Cape Town, I discovered that he had lived in my hometown, Durban, for around six months, before making the switch to Cape Town, and then to New York. 

I was particularly curious about his motivation for wanting to serve as a local assembly member in New York City.

And so he narrated to me how, as a 15 or 16 year old – he had been profiled at New York City’s JFK airport following a trip from abroad with his family. He was put in a double-mirrored interrogation room and asked if he had gone to a terrorist training camp; if he had intentions of attacking the US.

He narrated, as a young man growing up in post-9/11 New York, how the level of police surveillance in his community shaped the lives of ordinary Muslims.

They couldn’t play football – or soccer as it’s known here – visit a mosque, or even smoke a shisha at a local cafe without being watched.

The level of scrutiny culminated in a kid from his high school being recruited as an informant for the New York Police Department (NYPD).

“And so what we’re trying to do in this campaign is to both reckon with that history and make it very clear in public as to what has been going on, and to also change it,” he told me at the time. 

We discussed his move from student activist to working on the campaign trail for different local candidates. 

Three things stood out to me during that first conversation. He mentioned almost immediately that he was interested in Muslim political empowerment, in elevating the question of Palestine, and in protecting the working class.

Later that year, on a chilly day, I visited him at his campaign office in Astoria, Queens.

The office, as I remember it, was a work in progress. 

Mamdani was warm, friendly and charming. He smiled – perhaps not as much as he does today – and gave off a personable, disarming touch. He exuded confidence without airs. A suave, unpretentious guy’s guy.

Following our brief chat, he casually recommended a shawarma place across the road on Steinway. 

That was five and half years ago. Today, Zohran is the mayor-elect of New York City.

This is the story of how he got there and what it might mean for a city yearning for change.

Muslims, Palestine, affordability 

It started in 2017.

Of course, Mamdani’s work in electoral politics began two years prior, but it was the approach of a socialist Palestinian Lutheran minister towards a city council run in 2017 that altered the way he saw the place of Palestine in US politics. 

As someone who had earned their political stripes through Palestine solidarity work at Bowdoin College as a student – where he founded the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter – Mamdani didn’t think that electoral politics could shift the needle on Palestine until he joined Khader El-Yateem’s campaign.

“Here I am, an immigrant, a man of colour, an independent, running for office. I want to be Trump’s worst nightmare,” El-Yateem said at the time.

To Mamdani’s surprise, El-Yateem – who had once been kept in solitary confinement in Israel – was not just open about his support for Palestine, but was adamant about his support for the BDS campaign against Israel. 

The Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a non-violent initiative that seeks to challenge Israel’s occupation and abuses of Palestinian human rights through economic, cultural and academic boycotts similar to the successful boycott campaigns against apartheid South Africa.

‘I will lay down my life for him’

– Momoudou, New York City taxi driver

El-Yateem lost the race, but it moved Mamdani to re-imagine the possibility of city politics. 

“It opened my eyes and the eyes of many other Muslim organisers to the prospect of actually running for office as a means of enacting change,” he told me.

Mamdani was already a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA- New York) and Muslim Democratic Club of New York. In the intervening years, he joined other political campaigns and worked as a foreclosure-prevention counsellor, working to help families keep their homes. 

Yet the help he could offer was few and far between – constantly constrained by a system designed to disadvantage the working class.

He concluded that dispossession occurred “because the state has allowed big capital and financial speculators to run amok within the housing market”. 

Helping people required a reconfiguration of the laws. He ran for office. 

“After decades of slashing taxes to line the pockets of the rich, New York State faces a politically manufactured budget deficit. To solve it, we need elected officials who have the political courage to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations to fund the life-saving public goods and services that our communities rely on,” the actor, and progressive New York City politician, said, as she became among his earliest endorsers. 

Upon becoming an assembly member in late 2020, Mamdani looked to shift the debate on transit fares, on power plant justice – he fought against creation of a natural gas plant in Queens – and debt relief for taxi drivers. 

It spoke of a man invested in economic justice, working through the mechanisms of the law – though he at times gestured toward more radical means to house those in need.

As an assembly member, his stint wasn’t particularly spectacular. But much of his work focused on coalition-building and shaping discourse, rather than signing bills that did little to advance a working-class agenda.

In the weeks following my first call with him, New York City, like the rest of the world was gripped by the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic ripped through the working class in the city.

Neighbourhoods like Queens and the Bronx were particularly impacted as working class families struggled with the shut down, be it through cramped housing that made social distancing impossible, or through the shut down of sections of the regular economy.

Mamdani found himself in the middle of it.

“The life has been taken out of the neighbourhood, “Mamdani told me in April 2020 as the city heaved under the pandemic.

“I was speaking with a Bangladeshi taxi driver just about last week, and he told me that he hasn’t been able to work for already three weeks.

“It makes you realise that this pandemic is blind to the realities of our society, but those realities dictate how people are impacted, and how long it will take them to be able to recover from this, whether it is medically, financially, mentally – all of these sorts of things – and I think that these pre-existing fault lines in our society have dictated that certain communities are being disproportionately hit by this disease,” Mamdani added.

Meanwhile, the work continued at Albany.

Among the few bills he did help to pass lowered the number of public participants required for a public hearing; minor, but subtly more democratic.

Later, he introduced the symbolic “Not on Our Dime!: Ending New York Funding of Israeli Settler Violence Act”, which sought to block $60m in funding to Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

The bill was shut down by local politicians almost immediately – but the response revealed the power of spectacle. The story drew headlines.

It was his intervention, however, the fight to secure debt relief for taxi drivers in 2021, through the auspices of a 15-day hunger strike outside City Hall, that put him on the map.  

“I will lay down my life for him,” Momoudou, a New York City taxi driver who had been initially been lumped with $750,000 debt, said of Mamdani following its successful alleviation.

Still, Mamdani remained a largely local figure outside his neighbourhood of Astoria and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in New York. He was, however, quietly building a name as one of a few local politicians who would speak boldly on affordability and, crucially, Palestine. 

And then came the events of 7 October 2023.

The genocide in Gaza 

The devastation of Gaza – to lives, homes, places of worship, refugee camps, hospitals – and the complicity and support for Israel by the then US president Joe Biden’s administration – catalysed what would become known as the biggest anti-war movement since the 1960s over US involvement in Vietnam.

As early as 13 October 2023, Mamdani began expressing fears over the danger of a genocide in Gaza.

“We are witnessing a genocide and humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Hospitals have run out of painkillers, and bodies are being stored in ice cream trucks. We are calling for a ceasefire because it is the only way to stop the killing and provide humanitarian aid,” Mamdani would add on 20 October 2023. 

During this period, New York City became a focal point of pressure campaigns demanding that universities, cultural institutions and media organisations answer for their complicity in the genocide in Gaza. 

​​The crisis fractured the self-professed moral authority of the western cultural establishment; institutions such as The New York Times appeared not as guardians of public conscience, but as active participants in the repression of dissent.

While Republicans and the mainstream Democratic leadership doubled down in support of Israel’s right to defend itself, progressive figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Occasio-Cortez (AOC) largely hesitated, unable or unwilling to offer moral clarity to a generation appalled by the assault on Gaza. 

Even a senior member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Ro Khanna, appeared to deferred his stance to the findings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – contingent on confirmation by the US state department.

These came as a death knell to progressive Democratic politics in the US.

The genocide had rendered them peripheral, even irrelevant figures. 

When AOC took the stage at the DNC in August 2024 and described Kamala Harris as “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bring the hostages home”, it signalled her final shift from insurgent outsider to party loyalist.

Describing it as a betrayal, Kareem Elrefai, a New-York based organiser with the DSA wrote that Gaza “was a red-line, defining issue of our time, and Ocasio-Cortez has found herself on the wrong side of it”.

Mamdani emerged out of this wreckage.

His early and consistent naming of the assault as genocide, his criticism of the crackdown on student encampments, and his solidarity with those vilified in the press won him admirers.

His position in a hyper-local, multi-racial, immigrant, working-class district – where tenants, taxi drivers and small shop owners lived the consequences of US foreign and domestic policy – gave him political cover to take such stances.

Whereas national leaders wavered, Mamdani, along with several activists, including the actor Cynthia Nixon, launched a hunger strike outside the White House, where in icy conditions, they urged Biden to alter course on Gaza.  

“We hunger-strike not because we want to. We hunger-strike because we have been forced by this president and by our government’s foreign policy. We hunger-strike because Palestinians have been doubted in life and death, and their experience has been erased,” Mamdani said at the time.

The hunger strike lasted some days. Biden, a self-avowed Zionist, didn’t budge. 

But the spectacle raised awareness of the devastation in Gaza and the complicity of the US government. He was part of a national story.

Back in New York City, the protests for Palestine had long reached a crescendo. 

Students who had protested for Palestine had been suspended; academics fired or their reputation dragged through the halls of Congress; even restaurant workers who dared to show support for a people being annihilated faced persecution. And underneath it all, activists continued to link the affordability crisis with the prioritisation of the US military industrial complex. 

If public resources can fund foreign military projects, why can’t they fund housing and social services here?

Mamdani found himself at the intersection of that question. 

The run for mayor 

In the summer of 2024, Mamdani began exploring a run for mayor.

Fahd Ahmed, executive director of Drum Beats, a group widely credited for being instrumental in Mamdani’s successful run for mayor, told me that when Mamdani approached the organisation last year to talk about a potential run for office tailored to the material interests of New Yorkers, he was immediately interested. 

They had seen how he had worked with the Taxi Workers Alliance; they knew he was willing to take risks, but also willing to work collaboratively.  

After a vetting process, Drum Beats was among five organisations, including Worker Families Party (WFP) and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), that endorsed him from day one. 

Ahmed described taking the campaign into communities as “exhilarating.”

“It deeply resonated, because it speaks to the material issues of working-class communities, and because it’s willing to speak to other larger issues of our communities that historically nobody’s willing to touch, like Palestine, like right-wing Hindu forces,” Ahmed said.

Ahmed said it wasn’t easy getting support from some community leaders. Many felt it was impossible. But grassroots enthusiasm outpaced caution, forcing leaders to choose between joining or being left behind.

‘[Mamdani] is interesting, and I think more thoughtful than his detractors would suggest’

– David Axelrod, former senior adviser to Barack Obama

Ahmed argued the affordability crisis – the inability to pay rent, buy groceries, accumulate savings – was driving people of colour towards the right because they were at least talking about the ills of the system. 

But the right wing – as embodied by figures such Donald Trump – were weaponising people’s disgruntlement with corporate takeovers, and militarism, by pushing people to turn on each other. Mamdani’s focus on the economy was a winner.

“It doesn’t mean that we are sidelining the other issues, but we want to lead with the material issues – rent, groceries, housing, transit,” Ahmed said.

In October, the announcement came that Mamdani was running for mayor of New York City with three promises: freezing the rent for rent stabilised tenants; free childcare; making buses fast and free.

At the time, Mamdani was polling at 1 percent. His candidacy felt like a test run. But he had other plans.

Mamdani’s team unleashed a thunderous social media campaign that caught not just opposition candidates off guard, but captured the imagination of a discerning New York public itself. 

A neglected electorate facing ICE raids, a cost-of-living crisis and high rents, yearned in search of deliverance; Mamdani rose to the occasion. 

It wasn’t just what he was promising, but how he made those commitments.

He was fresh, energetic. He was earnest. His promises were straightforward and uncomplicated. 

It was genius. Mamdani’s team managed to adapt his politics to the media of the day – TikTok, Instagram, X, WhatsApp – engineering his message to the logic of the platform. He prioritised influencers, cultural-specific content that spoke uniquely to different communities, in several languages too. 

His message leaned on cultural representation, drawing on the levers of Bollywood, warm inviting typography, and humour; while never letting go of the pedal: making NYC affordable. 

Offline, he committed to knocking on a million doors. Observers say the canvassing was extraordinary. 

He made politics – out of reach to so many brown working-class immigrants in particular – accessible. He spoke with them about the issues that concerned them; and they felt heard and seen.

It shouldn’t have even been a contest with Cuomo, the independent candidate backed by Trump, given the history of corruption, the death of the elderly during Covid 19 under his watch, the sexual allegations pitted against him. 

But given the sheer idiocy of American politics, Cuomo came with wealth, name recognition and billionaire backers – he had to be defeated.

Still, the more Mamdani emerged as a viable challenge, the trickier it would become.

Following the first primary debate, AOC endorsed him. Weeks later, Bernie Sanders would follow suit.

By then, Mamdani had already secured the youth and a large majority of the left in NYC.

Given the large-scale disappointment on the left with AOC and Sanders, their endorsement felt less like authentic popular leadership and more like catch up.

Others saw it as an attempt to rehabilitate their own reputation, and critically, the reputation of the Democratic Party that had dragged through the mud over its pro-corporate, anti-working class and war-mongering agenda.

And then Obama called.

Following his victory in the Democratic Primary that made him the Democratic Party candidate for mayor, Mamdani reportedly received a call from former US President Barack Obama.

Obama is said to have, according to the New York Times, “offered him advice about governing and discussed the importance of giving people hope in a dark time, according to people with knowledge of the conversation”.

As if on cue, Mamdani began consolidating his team with former Obama aides floating into his orbit. 

Jeffrey Lerner, the former Democratic National Convention (DNC) director, joined as his communications chair.

The appointment raised some eyebrows, especially given Lerner’s colourful work history, including working for Cuomo in 2007.

Then there were reports that Zara Rahim was hired as a consultant to work on digital strategy. Rahim previously worked as a digital director for Obama. Later she served as a spokesperson for Hillary Clinton. 

Soon enough, sections of the establishment appeared to constrain and discipline his language; there was a marked shift in his focus; he looked to appear reasonable, palatable, to some of  the very issues that had given a boost to his campaign.

Through looking to work with establishment Democrats, and creating a transitional team of City Hall veterans and non profit executives, he promisedcontinuity.

Mamdani met with business leaders to assuage their fears and Obama aides, including Patrick Gaspard – the national director for former President Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign – introduced him to other city power brokers. 

“I went over and he, indeed, is interesting, and I think more thoughtful than his detractors would suggest,” David Axelrod, CNN chief political analyst and former senior adviser to President Obama said of his meeting with Mamdani, as arranged by Gaspard.

“I told Mamdani that I don’t agree with every proposal he has, but I know he is asking the right questions,” Axelrod added.

Shifting rhetoric 

By September 2025, Mamdani was no longer the insurgent assembly member from Astoria with socialists, Arab and Muslim, anti-Zionist Jews and working-class South Asians his primary focus. 

He was running for mayor of one of the most intensely pro-Israel political environments on the planet. 

Things, it appears, would have to be adjusted, to win.

First, he apologised for comments he made previously about the police being racist and calls to defund the police -from 2020, in which he also said, “There is no negotiating with an institution this wicked and corrupt.”

But he went beyond simply softening his stance on the police.

He said would let the current police commissioner, Jessica Tisch – an avowed pro-Israel supporter who has also led mass surveillance against NYC’s Muslim communities – an issue that helped promulgate his run for office in the first place – stay on next year.

Then, after being questioned repeatedly about Israel’s ‘right to exist’, he conceded that it had the right to exist as a state where all people were equal. 

Organisers wished he had adopted the obvious position: no state had the inherent right to exist, and certainly not a settler-colony like Israel.

‘His backtracking on his pro-Palestinian stance disappointed me’

– Cassandra, 21-year-old New Yorker

Some of his supporters argued that by calling for equal rights, he was calling for the dismantlement of settler-colonialism.

This perspective however, ignores that the call for equal rights doesn’t address the fundamental nature of dismantling settler-colonial rule: the question land back.

This, in many ways, helps explain the support from liberal Zionists in the city.

Mamdani was also harassed over the slogan “Globalize the Intifada”, he promised to discourage it.

He cited a rabbi’s fear that the phrase would provoke attacks in New York – here centring Jewish communal anxieties at a moment when Palestinians were being killed in overwhelming numbers.

Then he said would hire people in his administration with whom he disagreed with on Israel, focusing on competence over alignment. 

He also gently walked back on his vow to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as mayor of New York City, arguing that he would act within the bounds of the law. 

Though his promise had always been symbolic – given that the US is not a signatory to the ICC – that he would feel the need to correct the record appeared designed to placate.

The language shifted in other ways, too.

During the Hindu festival of Diwali, he visited a temple and said that while he opposed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist policies, he understood that there were people in New York “who may feel differently than me about Mr Modi, and that’s their right, and I will look to represent them all the same, because my responsibility to them as New Yorkers is to ensure that they are safe, to ensure they can afford this city”.

The usually incisive Mamdani appeared to be stretching his coalition outward in ways that risked diluting the internationalist commitments that once grounded his politics. 

If his project was to defend those targeted by structures of racial and economic domination, then one had to ask: where are the boundaries of that protection? Would anti-Semitic white nationalists also be welcomed under his rhetorical tent? If not, why then would Hindu nationalists or Zionists be welcome?

As someone who started an SJP chapter at his college, attended scores of rallies for Palestine, who also supported anti-Hindutva protests in New York City – some began to question how he could then pander to the very Zionists and Hindu nationalists responsible for reinforcing domestic support for ethnonationalist regimes abroad.

And it’s been a question on my mind for months.

Earlier this year, when Mamdani attended an interfaith Eid gathering at the Indian consulate in NYC, I asked him to clarify why he would go to an Eid event hosted by the Indian government. 

“Celebrating the spirit of Eid with unity, gratitude, and joy!” the consulate boasted on its social media platforms.

I asked him if he would attend an Eid event at the Israeli embassy in New York City, knowing how the Israelis were treating Muslims and Palestinians. 

He didn’t reply.

Mamdani’s purported attempt to separate the American empire from domestic governance as a strategic tactic to build a broad base of support is not just a denial of the forces of history that elevated him to this moment, but a misreading of how local bread and butter issues were inextricably linked to US imperial matters. 

But Ahmed from Drum Beats says that criticism needs to be weighed proportionally. 

“Are there any other major electoral races that have emerged where somebody has taken a sharper line and demonstrated success with it? The answer is no,” Ahmed added. 

The veteran organiser says the Islamophobic attacks and accusations of antisemitism that Mamdani faced over the past would have been even more intense had he refused to make some concessions. Mamdani had also faced a barrage of attacks from the Hindu right wing, too, for having spoken about Modi, or for previous attendance at anti-Hindutva rallies.

As the argument goes, Mamdani, didn’t disavow Palestine or say he would stop talking about Hindu nationalism. He only tweaked his approach.

New York’s first Muslim mayor

On 4 November 2025, Mamdani was elected the new mayor of New York City.

His election was watched across the US, in South Asia and the Middle East, in Uganda and South Africa. 

The optics of a South Asian, Muslim and immigrant to have captured NYC a mere two decades after the events of September 11 that had given rise to the so-called War on Terror that killed close to a million people worldwide – many of whom were Muslim – carried its own symbolism. 

Was his victory a crack in the US empire? Or was this a classic case of America’s enduring capacity to neutralise dissent through inclusion – where those who begin by challenging the system eventually help sustain it?

A hint of what might come emerged from Mamdani’s victory speech, where he quoted a section of the address given by the first Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, at the dawn of creation of India in 1947: “A moment comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance. Tonight, we have stepped out from the old into the new,” Mamdani narrated.

But did Nehru take India from the old to the new?

For those who know – including most likely Mamdani himself – Nehru was an upper-caste Brahman, who oversaw a structure that didn’t truly bring real decolonisation and continued many of the functions of the colonial apparatus – but, this time, with a brown man in charge. 

He occupied Kashmir, forcibly annexed Hyderabad and disrupted movements for self-determination in the North East, and subordinated popular movements across the country in the name of modernity. 

By drawing on Nehru, Mamdani appeared to disavow any prospect of real change in NYC. He appeared to be offering a facade of change. 

And indeed, Mamdani’s victory is not the first history-making event in US politics. Rashida Tlaib, AOC, Ilhan Omar, and before them, Obama, were heralded as transformative. 

They, too, were deified by fans, supporters and independent media. They, too, in different degrees, have had to dance to the tune of US foreign policy or the Democratic establishment.

And it’s not as if the signs are going by unnoticed.

“His backtracking on his pro-Palestinian stance disappointed me. I recognise the political pressure in New York, where even minimal solidarity with Palestinians draws severe backlash and violent threats, but I wish he had stayed firm,” Cassandra, a 21-year-old student from New York City who asked to be identified by her first name, told me.

“The genocide against Palestinians has only worsened, and it is crucial that Palestinian communities in New York feel seen, supported, and safe,” she said, adding that she voted for Mamdani based on his consistent position on improving the standard of living in the city.

Cassandra said her family were recipients of food aid and during the federal shutdowns, the delays had consequences for the wellbeing of the household.

Mamdani’s promises had the potential to transform their lives.

Likewise, another student supporter of Mamdani, 20-year-old Alina, who asked to be identified only by her first name as well, told me that she, too, was unhappy with his backtracking.

“I don’t know if it’s because of the egregious amounts of Islamophobic campaigns that were launched against him, but I wish he would’ve just stuck with his original stance. Sticking with it would have shown an even stronger message.”

“But he’ll also get accountability from us,” she added.

But therein lies another conundrum. It is unclear how Mamdani might be held accountable, or to whom.

For all the accusations that he is a communist or a radical, Mamdani is a democratic socialist – where there is an emphasis on government taking more control on critical economic levers like transport, or energy, or health, that benefits the public instead of corporations.

The idea is to build a more inclusive economic order, not necessarily transform it. 

Although he had the support of organisations such as the Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, he ultimately ran on his own platform, not as a representative of a disciplined membership formation. 

There is, as of yet, no organisational structure capable of setting collective priorities or binding him to a shared programme.

In practical terms, there is no educational or political spine to the movement that elevated him: no cadre development, no mass assembly, no mechanism of recall. 

What exists instead is a constellation of door-knocking networks, viral social media currents, and a sense of shared-identity.

For many, he is the young man who speaks about Palestine, brings warmth, and looks like the people he claims to represent.

But without a democratic organisation to which he is meaningfully accountable – one that can set policy collectively and insist that its representatives remain tethered to the movement’s horizon – Mamdani, or more precisely the people who voted for him, face a profound challenge.

The coalitions that helped bring him to power are now left to the mercy of his conscience and City Hall’s political calculations. Organisers readily admit this is something they are still trying to resolve.

So have New Yorkers been duped by a polished, sophisticated outreach campaign?

Not exactly, says Nazia Kazi, an associate professor of anthropology at Stockton University, who has written extensively about Muslims in the US since the events of 11 September 2001.

She told me the problem was rather that “Americans are not taught to ask savvy questions.” 

Kazi points to Mamdani’s hiring of Lerner, the former Democratic National Convention (DNC) director, as his communications chair as an example of a development that hasn’t been probed enough by his supporters.

“Just over a year ago, the DNC was the site of delegates covering their ears as protesters read the names of children killed by Democrat-provided bombs in Gaza.

“What does it mean for Mamdani to say he’d like to continue working with Jessica Tisch [the New York Police commissioner] who presided over the crackdown at Columbia University and has been an outspoken supporter of Israel? 

“And more importantly, what does it mean that people who raise these timely and pragmatic questions are dismissed outright, accused of trying to impede a movement rather than propel it?” Kazi asked rhetorically.

It is unclear how Mamdani would respond if mass mobilisation were directed against his administration – particularly given his stated commitment to staffing his government based on technical competence rather than ideological alignment.

“It’s not just that the ruling class allows glimmers of critique or dissent; it’s that these glimmers then serve a very real function, which is to tame and redirect people’s political energies into the orbit of the two party system,” Kazi added.

Ahmed, from Drum Beats, however is still hopeful, but conceded that the moment did demand a careful balance between external pressure and internal governance.

City organisers who came out to canvas, and voters, too, remain hopeful that Mamdani will stay committed to the project that carried him into office – but in a vacuum of organisational accountability, the pull of individual celebrity may be difficult to resist. 

It has reshaped politicians more experienced than him. 

“If Mamdani can get free buses and affordable childcare into New York – great. This will require organised, ongoing, mass mobilisation in a city beholden to the dictates of capital. But you can’t demonise the people who remember how quickly Medicare for All was abandoned by the Bernie cabal, or how Obama – nicknamed, by the way, the Deporter-In-Chief for his crackdown on migrants – also promised to close Gitmo and make community college free,” Kazi said.

And in America, where the desire for a savior so often looms large, the spotlight can swallow even the most principled intentions, leaving the movement defanged, soothed by vibes rather than structures capable of confronting power.

The task ahead, then, does not merely rest with Mamdani alone, but with those who placed their hopes in him.

Additional reporting by Hayaa Beig in New York City.