Contemporary of the youth: New York mayor Zoran Mamdani has proved popular with Gen Z.
“And so it begins.” Those four words — President Trump’s terse reaction — have become the viral caption for a moment that feels larger than one city’s vote count.
New York has elected a 34-year-old democratic socialist, Zoran Mamdani, on a platform packaged for the age of the infinite scroll.
The world’s first generation of internet natives — Gen Z — just demonstrated that the political feed is no longer a sideshow; it is the show.
Seen in isolation, New York looks like an outlier. Seen in context, it is part of a pattern. From Asia to Africa to South America, young crowds rally around the same grievances — cost of living, corruption, inequality — often speaking the lingua franca of memes and short videos, not the prose of party manifestos.
Their iconography is telling.
A reimagined Jolly Roger from the Japanese manga One Piece — the Straw Hat skull — has flown above protests from Nepal to Indonesia to Morocco and Peru.
That pirate flag, stitched from fiction, is a real-world banner for a generation that is experiencing politics as a borderless, online commons and then exporting it to the streets.
New York’s result translates that street energy into electoral arithmetic. Mamdani leaned into issues that animate urban youth: housing affordability, taxing the very rich, a more vocal stance on Palestine.
He communicated in digital-native cadence — self-shot reels, man-on-the-street clips, in-jokes and jump cuts — speaking not like a podium politician but like a neighbour with a camera. The message was less “trust me” than “you already know me”.
But this is not a one-way street ideologically. The same platforms have turbocharged the right. Germany’s AfD converted TikTok virality into a trebling of the under-24 vote share between 2021 and 2025.
In the United States, conservative influencers weaponised anti-“woke” culture to pull young voters toward a tougher brand of nationalism. The algorithm is neutral; the outcomes are not.
The side that pairs narrative with numbers — emotion with execution — wins.
The temptation, especially among critics, is to dismiss Mamdani’s triumph as style over substance. That would be a mistake. Style is a substance in politics where attention is currency.
The deeper question is whether this new attention economy can finance governing — budgets, trade-offs, timelines — after the viral moment fades. Slogans scale instantly; services and state capacity do not.
There is also the identity turn. Mamdani’s insistence that New York is built by immigrants and now led by one taps a rich American tradition while provoking familiar anxieties.
The test for any leader riding this wave is whether a celebration of plural roots can be matched by a unifying civic canopy — shared rules, shared responsibilities, shared stakes. Without it, the city risks trading old polarisations for new tribalism.
Musk’s “And so it begins” frames a second, parallel contest: power versus permission. Expect flashpoints where city promises collide with federal prerogatives — on immigration enforcement, policing, even trade-adjacent questions like procurement.
The United States has a long history of states and cities serving as policy laboratories. What is new is the speed: digital organisation allows a mayoral agenda to become a national argument overnight — and to meet an equally rapid counter-mobilisation.
Economic reality will referee. A generation that feels priced out of home ownership, trapped by debt, and undercut by precarious work will keep voting for disruption until the living-standards equation changes. That pain is real. But it does not follow that maximal statism is the only remedy.
The true cleavage is not capitalism versus socialism; it is open competition versus rigged systems. Cronyism — public or private — produces outrage. Reform that restores fairness — housing supply, skills pipelines, antitrust where markets ossify, tax codes that reward work and innovation — produces growth.
For Democrats, the lesson is straightforward: authenticity beats triangulation, but arithmetic still beats applause. A housing plan that builds, not just bills, will matter more than a viral clip.
For Republicans, the warning is clear: whichever party offers credible answers on cost of living and upward mobility will own the next decade of urban politics.
Mocking meme politics is a losing strategy; mastering it for serious ends is the only viable response.
New York is now the laboratory of the world’s most powerful media engine — Gen Z’s attention. If Mamdani turns this energy into competent governance, other cities will copy-paste.
If the project devolves into punitive rhetoric or performative regulation, capital and talent will vote with their feet, and the city will pay the familiar price of flight, frayed services, and fraying trust.
What begins should not be an endless culture war, but a competition to prove that democratic systems can still deliver – fast enough, fair enough, and for enough people to matter.
That, not the latest viral soundbite, will decide whether this electoral earthquake becomes a renaissance or just another tremor in an age of perpetual disruption.
Dr Imran Khalid is a freelance columnist on international affairs based in Karachi, Pakistan.