The Cosmopolitan Message of Zohran Mamdani

by Mariairene Fornari

Last night, Zohran Mamdani won the Mayoral elections of New York. Not only an unprecedented milestone for a 34-year-old, but also a message of hope for the Democratic electorate in the USA.

Zohran is part of the Democratic Socialist  wing of the democratic party, where Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Bernie Sanders and Elisabeth Warren also affiliate themselves. In a party so big, it is normal to have divisions like this, more leftists and more centrists. Some commentators say that this radicalism can be counterproductive as the democrats will lose the centrists votes. Yet, I am sorry to break it to commentators that those centrist votes have long been looted by the MAGA Republicans…

But I am writing this piece not to talk about US party politics. Even though the ideological fragmentations of the two party systems should be further discussed.

I am here to celebrate. I am here to celebrate and talk about what this electoral victory means for thousands of people like me, who were sold the dream of a cosmopolitan world as kids before reactionary politics took over to shake everything we believed in.

 • • •

While on a NYC election rabbithole yesterday night I read:

“How can he be mayor of a city if he wasn’t even born there”

I froze.

Who even asks these questions in 2025, 2026 already considering it is November.

Maybe with the rise of reactionary politics, we are all growing accustomed to conservatives’ takes like this. Especially the younger people. That is sad and worrying because nobody is exempted by the zeitgeist of our times, and unfortunately this is the zeitgeist in question.

So, of course I had to understand why he would say something like this.

After a deep dive into her bio, not that I was questioning his legitimacy, I read that Zohan moved to NY at the age of 7. He has lived in New York for his entire life.

Many of the articles focus on the fact that Zohan was born in Uganda and is a Muslim. Many commentators, journalists and online users, specifically frame this as a problem.

A problem that I don’t see.

NY is one of the most multicultural cities in the world. A foreign born  muslim mayor is just a representation of this face of the city. Not to be “whataboutist” but even London for the sake of this multiculturality has a “muslim mayor”. This same news broke the internet in 2016.

The Mamdani’s family, of Indian descent, moved extensively. One of the reasons being Zohran’s father’s job as Professor of Post-colonial studies. And fun fact, he himself attended a  liberal arts college and majored in African Studies. 

So once you make sense of his background, you realise that there is so much complexity and that his diasporic identity is a syncretism of so many elements that ultimately just make Zohran Mamdani a New Yorker.

Interestingly, his father, Mahmood Mamdani, has a book titled “Neither Settler nor Native”, where he tackled the hybridity of permanent minorities inside the “nation state”.

Reading about his background I cannot help but think how he himself and his victory represent so much for all the people with diasporic and hybrid identities.

For how silly that can sound, I think about myself, and all the grammar mistakes I now make when I write in (what used to be) my primary language. I think about my friends from the Institute and I think about how when I was studying in Toronto nobody ever complimented my accent or asked where I was from. I think about my friend Alina who insisted on buying me a coffee because, she explained, gift giving is part of her culture. Of my culture too, I remember thinking.

So while I get moved by the gift of multiculturality, I get worried that people are ungrateful for this. I get worried because 12 years ago people would have laughed at my face for praising something so natural and common as multiculturalism. In my middle school’s english textbook we had a focus section on what “melting pot” meant and how cities like, indeed, London and New York were exemplary of this. Then around 2015 something changed… I don’t wanna refer in detail to policies and historical events, but if you are a kid that grew up in the 2010s you know exactly what I am talking about, about this switch. The end of a cosmopolitan sensibility and the birth of reactionary patriotism, called nationalism, went by in front of our eyes.

For example, in case you didn’t know, many in Switzerland are endorsing a green paper that limits migration in the country. Specifically, the law wants to cap the population in Switzerland to below 10 millions. Putting checks not only on immigration, but also on fertility control.

The proposal was now rejected by the house of representatives, but counter proposals and rewritings remain in talks.

Again, drawing from my personal experience, I find this crazy. There is a placard and a small memorial in Rue des Alpes Geneva that shows Italian seasonal workers coming into the country to work. Some members of my family were part of this migration. A few weeks ago as I visited my family, my Aunt was telling me about Basel Carnival and how excited she was to wake up at night, when everything was pitch black still, to go join the parade as a kid.

People have moved, migrated, since the dawn of time.

Migrations and mobilities are irregular, they don’t always make sense. And every individual experience that stems from it is special and unique in its own way.

Swiss politics remain very different from the rest of the world due to its emphasis on direct democracy and “single issue voting”. On the other hand, because of its quadrilinguism and the presence of many IOs, NGOs, Internationally Avant Guard academic centres and Multinationals bank and corporations, I have always perceived Switzerland as a multicultural place. Hence, what is the place of population control initiatives in a country that relies on its diversity and is still diverse and multicultural?

And maybe I don’t come from afar, but I still see the inward and outward dangers of this reactionary rhetoric on the diaspora. If it wasn’t for the reactionary cultural and political shift that happened around 2015, nobody would care where you are from. Or where were you born. And nobody would focus on this when covering the New York elections.

What I am trying to reflect on, is that reactionary politics has changed the way we perceive ourselves and others as cosmopolitan subjects, and this has a political message inside and outside party politics.
That is why, a lot of people are focusing on who Mamdani is, and what his identity means for the world. For some it is refreshing, for me, a kid that grew up in a provincial town of (semi)rural Italy, it warms my heart to see that the dream I was long ago sold still exists.

As a young woman who moved around a bunch of times (is 4 countries and 5 cities enough to speak about this?) and got to see how the real world works. I am proud to see that people still unite under the same values, the same politics and the same dreams.

As an analysis of Novara Media explained, Mamdani didn’t even centre his campaign on his own identity. But rather, as a democratic socialist, he managed to pivot on the common struggles of the people of New York. On top of being the incarnation of the contemporary New-yorker, or Londoner, or Parisienne, or Berliner, he found common ground by putting his politics at the center stage. Living in one of the most diverse metropolises of the world, what set him ahead was his universal political message. But needless to say, and I partly disagree with Novara Media here, his story, his charisma and his persona, ultimately made this political message fly high!

Cosmopolitanism and Universalism have always gone hand in hand.

For the sake of leftist internationalism, the label of democratic socialist speaks volume of itself alone! 

That is why for me, the winning of Zohran is a message of hope for the whole world, not just the US.

And just as much the artery of individual diaspora experiences unites us, political beliefs and political hopes also unites us across borders.

And while the Democratic Party leadership may be scared of losing some centrist votes, Zohran Mamdani has won an election for the world.