Liberal politicians outside the US have watched Zohran Mamdani’s election win as New York mayor with interest, with some saying it offers lessons in how to combat the rise of rightwing populism.
News of the 34-year-old’s victory rang out around the globe, from his birth country of Uganda, to France and Britain, where anti-immigrant, far-right parties are breaking into mainstream politics, and India, where Mamdani is claimed as a son of the diaspora.
Abhishek Manu Singhvi, a prominent opposition figure in India, said Mamdani’s victory “shows that liberal values still prosper” in Donald Trump’s US and that “youth, energy and dynamism matter”.
The Times of India noted that Mamdani had quoted India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in his victory speech, saying: “A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new.”
The newspaper said Mamdani had celebrated his win the same way he had campaigned: “Loud, defiant, and unmistakably Indian.”
Mamdani is publicly proud of his international background. Born in Kampala to parents of Indian origin – one Hindu and one Muslim – he moved to New York with his family at the age of seven and became a US citizen in 2018. His wife, Rama Duwaji, an illustrator, is an American of Syrian descent.
In Uganda, which has had the same authoritarian president for nearly four decades, the opposition leader Joel Ssenyonyi said Mamdani’s win was “a big encouragement, even to us here in Uganda, that it’s possible”. But he added: “We have a long way to get there.”
Across Europe, progressive politicians also appeared to be taking notes, from the liberal mayor of Budapest – whose prime minister is the Trump ally Viktor Orbán – to Labour figures in the UK, where Nigel Farage, a Trump acolyte, is ahead in polls.
The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, congratulated his US contemporary. “New Yorkers faced a clear choice, between hope and fear, and just like we’ve seen in London, hope won,” he wrote.
Khan was also the first Muslim mayor of his city and has attracted similar hostility from Trump. Unlike Mamdani, however, Khan is a career politician rather than a newcomer.
Another Labour politician, the MP Luke Charters, said Mamdani’s victory “shows us how we can defeat rightwing populism here in the UK: deliver real solutions, not empty slogans”. Mamdani’s main campaign tactic has been to pledge to make New York more affordable.
Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader who now sits as an independent MP, said Mamdani had succeeded in igniting “a grassroots campaign, built on the radical idea that everyone deserves to live in dignity”.
The French politician Manon Aubry, a co-chair of the Left group in the European parliament, said the win had come in spite of “the media, economic and political establishment that spent tens of millions of dollars to block his path”.
She said Mamdani had “managed to turn the tables with radically concrete proposals (rent freeze, free buses, public daycare …) and without ever averting his gaze from racism and Gaza”.
There was some disappointment in Israel, which Mamdani has accused of carrying out a genocide – a position rejected by the Israeli government but shared by genocide experts and scholars as well as a UN inquiry.
“New York will never be the same again,” wrote Amichai Chikli, the Israeli minister of diaspora affairs. “The city is walking, eyes open, into the abyss into which London has already plunged.”
Roughly a million Jews live in and around New York City, the largest population of Jewish people in a city outside Israel. Mamdani made reaching out to Jewish communities a key part of his campaign and has been vocal against antisemitism. He has faced Islamophobia from Democratic and Republican politicians.
In his victory speech, Mamdani told cheering supporters: “We will build a City Hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism.”
Trump made an 11th-hour intervention in the election race on Tuesday, smearing Mamdani as a “Jew hater” on his social media platform and calling all Jews who voted for him “stupid”.
A CNN exit poll suggested Mamdani may have won as many as one in three Jewish votes.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
