Zohran Mamdani and Zack Polanski: Make hope normal again

It isn’t common for an American political candidate, days before an election, to release a campaign video in Syrian Arabic. But Zohran Mamdani has never played by the rules of the Murdoch press, nor accepted the “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim” binary that measures his faith by its closeness to Western approval.

Now, on the cusp of a historic New York mayoral victory, he’s remaking what American politics can sound like — and doing so in the language of those it so often demonises -- Elon Musk described Arabic as the language of "the enemy".

The video was a last, calculated act of mischief, a wink aimed at an establishment in full witch-hunt mode. In the final week of the race, French philosopher turned Times Square doomsday prophet Bernard Henri-Lévy warned in The Wall Street Journal that a Mamdani victory would “embolden totalitarians around the world.” The New York Times joined the hysteria, running the ‘elephant in the room’ as a headline: “If elected, how would Mamdani use his electoral power to affect Israel?”

The insinuation is familiar — the “dual loyalty” dog whistle used to cast Muslims and minorities as outsiders who could never be fully American. Yet time and again, Zohran Mamdani has sidestepped the banana skins laid out by ‘legacy media’, exposing talking points as pro-Israel, Islamophobic and, ultimately, irrelevant, winning support across the five boroughs and beyond.

Strip away the noise, and Mamdani is far less divisive than the tabloids would have you believe. Jewish New Yorkers aged 18 to 44 voted overwhelmingly for him in the Democratic primary, undercutting the media’s caricature of a city supposedly voting for Sharia. The numbers reveal not a polarised electorate but a polarising press — a gulf between voters who embrace a plural, progressive vision of the world’s most influential city and media barons who continue to pathologise it.

Yet Mamdani’s ascent is more than a local upset. It signals a hopeful reimagining of the Left, one that has a positive, sunny outlook as well as being anti-racist, pro-worker, and alive to the climate crisis.

The Green Surge

Across the pond, Zack Polanski, Britain’s new Green Party leader, speaks in the same political key as Zohran Mamdani. His slogan, “Let’s Make Hope Normal Again,” carries the same moral clarity as his American counterpart, the same refusal to cede optimism to oligarchs. Like Mamdani, he’s mastered the scroll of social media, speaking to young voters in tones that feel real and unfiltered. And, like Mamdani, he’s been praised by the grassroots and punished by the press: the broadsheets warn of culture war chaos, Labour dismisses him as naïve, but both miss the point; plausible hope was the message all along.

The Green Party is now the third-largest political party in Britain by membership — outflanking both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, once “the most successful political party in Western democracy.” Recent polling even places the Greens a point ahead of the ruling Labour, a party they’ve already overtaken in a by-election in Labour’s Welsh stronghold of Grangetown.

Zack Polanski’s vision isn’t utopian; it’s a grounded pragmatism that swaps the obsession of capital for a politics that taxes extreme wealth, reins in private landlords, restores public services, and treats migrants and refugees as neighbours, not suspects. Ultimately, both Mamdani and Polanski grasp what their opponents refuse to: it’s the cost of living for ordinary people, not immigration, that voters care about.

And like Mamdani, Polanski is staunchly pro-Palestinian.

Now a Muslim from New York and a Jew from Salford have the chance to reshape politics in two nations whose “special relationship” has long been defined by illegal invasions and shared complicity in genocide. Both know the weight of holding power in countries that have exported insecurity and bloodshed across the world. When Polanski called the British government an “active participant” in Gaza’s genocide, and Mamdani accused the US of “complicity” in a “genocidal war,” it marked the beginning of a reckoning our politics needs if we are ever to learn that ‘never again’ really does mean ‘never again’.

When New Yorkers go to the polls tomorrow, the choice could not be starker. Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani’s main opponent, has bet on fear, borrowing from Trump’s lexicon of menace, stoking panic for capital. Trump, in turn, has threatened to cut federal funding and send the National Guard if Mamdani wins, replaying his politics of paranoia. But the mood feels different this time. If early polling holds, New Yorkers are tired of hate being sold as blind patriotism. They want free school buses, not ICE buses deporting families to El Salvador. And in Zohran’s bodega cadence, they hear something rare in today’s politics: the sound of normal hope returning and the inevitability of the far right in power shattering.

The New Arab Editorial represents the collective voice of The New Arab’s editorial team, presenting views that promote authentic discourses on the MENA region and beyond. 

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