New York is seen in Mamdani

With the highest participation in a municipal election since 1969 (this citizen activation is fundamental and very significant), Mamdani won the mayorship of New York with 50.5% of the votes, after defeating the veteran former governor Cuomo and rage donald trump.

Mamdani, 34 years old, son of immigrants and born in Kampala (Uganda), is the first Muslim mayor, the first born in Africa and also the youngest in New York in more than a century.

He defines himself as a socialist (democratic socialistto put it in the American context), speaks Spanish (and other languages), and with his campaign he changed government plans with the urgency of someone who wants to change everything as quickly as possible.

Its basis: a grand open-door plan, three million personal home visits (knocking on three million doors) and the bravado promise to “make this city better for you than it was yesterday.”

Claiming to be a socialist in the United States seemed like an exclusionary provocation, but it is no longer synonymous with marginality. On the contrary, it showed that it could be the door to a new urban history.

Earn with this tag reveals how much and how political frameworks are changing.

With this label under Mamdani’s victory, Trump politically loses the symbol of the city where he was born: he always used New York as a stage and altar. He turned this into the metaphor for his success, his theater of golden mirrors. The Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, the parties at the Plaza, the reality The Apprentice.

His New York was a temple of marble, glass and ego. For decades, embodied the city’s neoliberal promise that rewards boldness and wealth, not compassion.

Mamdani’s election destroys this myth live. He snatches the scepter from him and says: “This city is mine too”.

During the election campaign, Trump called Mamdani a “lunatic communist” and a “jihadist disguised as a progressive” and stated that his victory would kill the American dream.

However, this victory feels more like a kick in the shins of the old order. A message for the economic elite: the city and its resources can no longer be managed as before.

But what does it mean in the United States to call yourself a socialist?

In Spain and Western Europe, socialism calls for broad social security systems and strong public services. In the United States, however, this does not necessarily equate to total collectivization or the elimination of capitalism, but rather to a State taking on a more important role in guaranteeing public services, redistribution and socioeconomic rights.

Calling oneself socialist is read in a radical light: the last frontier for conservatives who have changed the political framework to the center-right with no signs of returning.

For many New York voters, Mamdani’s “socialism” is not the red ghost of the 1950s, but the promise to stop the erosion of the working middle classto connect with the city’s invisible people.

Mamdani is not a moderate liberal. He is a classic left-wing populist, with a tie, charisma and overflowing friendliness, who became the moving reference point that a city in collapse needed.

A very well-managed enemy of Trump, with the increased capabilities of the 21st century and the efficient elevation of the Muslim precedent of Sadiq Khan as Mayor of London in an ideal time and setting.

Because if there is a place where the left-wing populism that Mamdani embodies fits like a glove, it is precisely in the city that never sleeps, because there is nowhere to sleep and lives get increasingly worse. Its urban structure has been favoring for decades capital accumulation, relentless gentrification and working class abandonment.

A place where the democratic promise has become a maze.

Mamdani understood it and expressed it without embarrassment.

With tens of thousands of homeless people, sleeping on the street or in subway carriages, exorbitant housing prices, aging transport and a dangerously cracked health and social system, the proposal was simple, almost elementary: increase taxes on the rich, open schools, hospitals and social housing, daycare centers and free transport, and feed people in municipal supermarkets.

It’s a classic wellness program covered in radical aesthetics. In a country obsessed with entrepreneurship and individualism, it seems like a revolution.

What was being fought for in New York was not a city hall, but, in a certain way, a political cosmogony. Mamdani’s campaign, more than an electoral race, was a counter-narrative. He used his first name as a brand (“Vota Zohran”), and did so with a naturalness that, in another big city like Madrid, would seem impossible (imagine a campaign with “Vota José Luis”?).

I was looking for trust, asking for time and faith. He knocked on three million doors (literally) and managed to restore the texture of hope to the vote.

Trump has built a myth of individual power. Wealth as virtue and spectacle. Mamdani built hers on shared fragility. It is logical that the first sees an existential threat in the second. Gold loses its charm when the streets are full of mattresses and blankets.

The “socialist” wins not because the people became communist, but because capitalism failed to fulfill its promises.

But the practical question is whether he can deliver on those promises. His words reached an electorate tired of technical promises and timid solutions. But New York Mayor is not a dream office: It is a huge apparatus, with multiple state powers, dependent on Washington, Albany and a rigid fiscal system..

And Trump has already announced an unprecedented shock with the withdrawal of federal funding.

Mamdani did not invent a new discourse, he collected the ruins of an old one. His victory does not herald the socialist paradise, although it certifies the exhaustion of the golden dream.

But what it managed to do was spark hope (or the illusion) that there is another way to manage the disaster. Now the challenge is to convert the epic campaign into effective management.