Dr. Miklos K. Radvanyi
The election of Zohran Mamdani to New York City mayor on November 5, 2025, was historical for multiple reasons. He defeated former governor Andrew Cuomo, he has become the city’s youngest mayor in more than a century, and he is the first Shi’a Muslim elected in a city with a population of almost ten million inhabitants. Even more significantly, his campaign signaled both a generational shift in New York’s politics as well as the growing influence of “progressive” movements within the Democrat Party. Accordingly, it centered on affordability, expanded public housing reform, strengthened tenant protections, and broadened public services, which energized diverse ethnic communities across the city. All these moral arguments were distilled into a clear premise – government has the power to rebalance a system tilted toward capital and high earners.
New York City’s affordability crisis is real and politically hardly sustainable in the long run. Yet, solutions that ignore market dynamics may prove self-defeating. The core question of this mayoralty is not ideological purity masquerading as “Democratic Socialism” – it is calibration. How far can redistribution go before it stymies growth? How much public expansion is feasible without eroding fiscal stability? The test is whether moral conviction can coexist with competence – whether moral cum religious urgency can be translated into policy that works at scale. Clearly, the voters in New York City have chosen bold experimentation over continuity. This choice deserves respect. It also calls for scrutiny. Promises won Mandani the election. Execution will define his political future.
Essentially, Mamdani’s election was less a revolution than a stress test. Generally, “Democratic Socialism” is a political and economic philosophy that attempts to reconcile political democracy with social or collective ownership of key parts of the economy – especially where markets are seen as producing inequality or instability. The differentiation between this form of “Socialism” from the Scandinavian “Social Democracy” is obvious: the latter keeps capitalism, but democratically regulates it in combination with a welfare state. Thus, in a “Social Democracy,” markets should decide most things. In “Democratic Socialism,” the state shall control most things.
From these perspectives, Zohran Mamdani is neither a purely Marxist-Leninist nor a mere representative of the Shi’a Muslim credo. As of yet, he does not openly advocate one-party rule, revolutionary seizure of the state, or the abolition of elections. On the surface, his declared politics are democratic, electoral, and constitutional. Yet, politics is also shaped to a large extent by hidden intentions: how ultimately power is understood, how legitimacy is framed, and how opposition is treated. When examined at these levels, Mamdani’s “Democratic Socialism” exhibits certain Leninist as well as Qur’anic cum Sharia principles of thought, even as he remains numb about Leninist and Qur’anic institutions. Most threateningly, his ‘Democratic Socialism” rests on the unspoken idea of a vanguard: a politically conscious minority that understands historical truth more clearly than the majority and, therefore, claims the right to lead them. In Mamdani’s political mind, the vanguard is not a disciplined party apparatus, but the moral activist minority.
Moreover, Mamdani accused his opposition as having bad faith, false consciousness, or beholden to the elite interests. Clearly, the essence of his politics is not persuasion among equals, but mobilization of the morally oppressed, yet awakened against entrenched power. For now, this is a soft, quasi democratic version of a Leninist cum Khomenei Shi’a Islamic assumption: that legitimacy comes from moral insight of a purist politician or God, rather than broad contested consensus. Additionally, a core Leninist as well as Khomenei Shi’a premise is that existing institutions – courts, markets, legislatures – are not neutral arbiters, but instruments of class domination. Mamdani’s worldview strongly echoes this scepticism. Landlords, corporations, financial institutions, and even procedural constraints are often treated not as imperfect, but structurally unjust forces whose legitimacy is suspect.
Thus, the following diagnoses are certain. Mandani believes that politics is a permanent state of struggle. As Lenin, he also treats conflicts not as a phase to be resolved, but as a permanent condition to be intensified until the uncontested victory. Yet, under the United States Republican Constitution, no politician can govern his domain as a battlefield indefinitely. Political communities require compromise, procedural patience, and acceptance of morally mixed outcomes. One of the main reasons for the Soviet Union collapse was the Communist Party’s inability to abandon the logic of permanent struggle once power was secured. For them as for Mamdani, politics is famously consequential, meaning that the end justifies the means. And at that point, Mamdani, Leninism, and the Qur’an as well as the Sharia coalesce. In general, Islam is also antipodal to democracy. Qur’an 9.5 contains the infamous “Sword Verse” that commands the faithful Muslims to “kill the idolaters wherever you may find them.” Furthermore, the treatment of al-Mushrikun – unbelievers of idolaters – is also described in exhaustive detail in verses 1-28, defining the latter as unclean, which in Arabic has an outrightly dehumanizing and racist character. Mamdani, Lenin and the Qur’an are also consequentialists. Absolute moral certainty justifies extraordinary – even illegal means. All this presents a troubling asymmetry. If justice is unavoidably necessary and delay is immoral, then restraint looks like complicity.
The furtive menace here is not radical critique. The peril is delegitimation without realistic replacement. Leninism as well as Khomenei Shi’ism attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to resolve this unbridgeable conundrum by abolishing pluralism. A so-called politician and here specifically a mayor, cannot govern New York City through the Leninist cum Islamic processes of Al-Taqiyya, which is the art of deception. By intentionally trying to dissemble one’s political or religious identity when in fear of the majority’s rejection, it is plausible to think that Mamdani cannot leave the logic of permanent struggle behind, once power was secured.