On the 24th of June, the young leader Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic Party primaries. The final results of the third round, published in July, saw him win with 56.21% of the vote (a total of 565,639 votes), the highest number of votes obtained by a candidate in the history of the city’s primary elections. This result left the Democratic party establishment favourite and former governor Andrew Cuomo, who obtained 43.79%, in second place.
Zohran Mamdani is a leader linked to the largest social democratic organisation in the United States, the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA), of which is a member of the Democratic Party. He is 33 years old, is of Ugandan origin, and came to the United States at the age of 7. He is a Muslim, and during his university years, was a co-founder of Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at his university. He is currently a member of the New York State Assembly from the large borough of Queens, where migration has made it the most ethnically and culturally diverse borough in the world.
What is most striking is that Mamdani triumphed by highlighting, during his campaign, his support for the Palestinian people and calling Israel’s actions genocide. He said he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited the city and that he would push for the taxation of organisations that support genocide in Gaza.
During his campaign, he also deployed a programme with progressive demands, deeply felt by the working class, such as reducing the cost of living, freezing rents, free buses and kindergartens, public supermarkets, tripling affordable housing, and taxing large corporations and the wealthy. His proposals include disbanding ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and creating the Department of Community Safety, saying that would not allow detentions and deportations, and would transform New York into a sanctuary city for migrants and dissidents.
Zohran Mamdani capitalises on growing struggles against Trump and genocide in Gaza
Zohran Mamdani’s election victory was celebrated not only by those who turned out to vote for him in New York City. In the midst of the Trumpist counteroffensive, it was experienced as a triumph and a respite by the fighters as a whole. Trump’s counteroffensive, the dismissal of public workers, the attack on social rights, the massive deportations and the militarisation of Los Angeles, has awakened an important vanguard that is mobilising massively and looking for an alternative to confront the far-right.
The Democratic Party, in crisis, begins to worry
The massive vote for Mamdani also expresses the deep crisis in which the Democratic Party finds itself following its embarrassing defeat by Donald Trump. The Biden-Harris administration ratified that the Democrats, as the party of the imperialist bosses, governed against the working class and, by associating themselves with the most reactionary Zionism in the United States, defended the State of Israel and support genocide. That’s why they lost a lot of popular and progressive support. In this way, they facilitated Trump’s return.
Mamdani’s electoral triumph is part of other mass phenomena, such as the ‘Fighting Oligarchy‘ rallies held by the likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – who supported Mamdani’s candidacy – which were attended by more than 36,000 people. These are expressions of the cracks with the Democratic Party and a slow but steady search for options to the left. Unfortunately, so far, neither Sanders nor Ocasio-Cortez, nor most of the DSA, have any plans to break with the Democratic Party.
Donald Trump’s threats in the wake of Mamdani’s victory were swift. He called him “a 100% Communist Lunatic”, said that if he won the elections on November 4th that he would keep a close eye on him, and even threatened to imprison and deport him if he refused to allow ICE to intervene in the city and carry out its deportation plan. Whatever deep political and strategic differences we may have with Mamdani, it is clear that, as an expression of the quest for leftward change of broad sectors of the struggle, we must defend the right to stand as a candidate, with further mobilisation and protests in the face of Republican attacks and the threats from Donald Trump.
