Zohran Mamdani's Stunning Victory: Lessons for Iran

In a stunning turn of development, the majority of New York voters have elected as their next mayor a young radical Muslim, who defied all odds by beating the status quo candidates and their powerful supporters, including President Trump, who has threatened to cut aid to the city if Mamdani is elected. But voters not only in New York but also in other races have voted Democratic, thus showing their frustrations with the Republican Party and its pro-oligarchy agenda.

While it remains to be seen how a Democratic socialist will succeed to implement his pro-labour policies, and the key is coalition-building with the moderate Democrats, other progressives and labour unions, there are serious ramifications for American politics beyond New York, marking a generational change, as most of the young voters chose a candidate of change over business as usual. 

In fact, one might say that Mamdani represents a larger, global phenomenon that can inspire change in other countries as well. Certainly, he can be inspirational for a new generation of politicians and political activists in Iran, in light of Iran's dormant politics dominated by stale ideas and voter alienation. Notwithstanding the recent controversies on elite banking fraud and growing class inequality in Iran's post-revolutionary society, where the largely irrelevant foreign policy priorities such as Israel have become the ruling class's dysfunctional obsession, the situation is ripe for the emergence of a new breed of young politicians who are fed up with clerical elitism, corruption, waste of national resources, foreign adventurism at exorbitant costs to national interests, and the like.

The ideals of democratic socialism know no national boundaries and, henceforth, despite the right-wing ideological restrictions that seek to protect and to reproduce Iran's crisis-ridden state capitalism, the time is ripening for a shift of the ideological landscape to the left, in the interest of suffering millions of Iranians who live below the poverty line and yet exposed to the luxurious life-style of the ruling elite with its iron grip on Iranian politics. A sea change in voters preference in Iran's restricted polity can be anticipated with generational boldness, imagination, and will to power that is not intimidated by the familiar repressive tactics from the top; a new social and political movement from below, gravitating toward the lofty ideals of class equality, redistribution of wealth, and pragmatic foreign policies, instead of a permanent war posture benefiting no one, is called for, one that can now look to Mamdani's example and draw the necessary lessons for a whole new chapter in Iranian politics, one that is future-oriented and progressive, instead of being backward-looking and reactionary.

This new generation of Iranian politicians should follow the logic of broad coalition-building that propelled Mamdani to victory, in Iran's case that means bringing together the legion of workers, government employees, women, the poor, the middle class, the environmentalists, and ethnic minorities together around a progressive distributive agenda that prioritizes opening the political space and targeting systemic corruption, tax evasion, bureaucracy, and so on. Only then, can there be a real hope for the new generation of Iranians that they can be hopeful about their future.