The cheerleading and the pearl-clutching in some South African circles over Zohran Mamdani’s New York victory are, frankly, a bit odd.
We’ve lived for thirty years (likely longer) with the very strain of “third-worldism” that Mamdani advances: a politics that divides the world into oppressors and oppressed and then builds policy atop that moral stage set.
We know this ideology’s track record at home and its failures (or, if you’re a local devotee, its “promise”). Mamdani may be something of an outlier inside American politics, but by South African standards, both he and his programme are quite typical. He’s not an orthodox Marxist. He speaks the idiom of decolonial morality, blending campus jargon with grassroots language, a register jarringly unfamiliar to American ears, which never endured the fallist crescendo that swept South African campuses.
So, to Americans and to South Africans who live too chronically online inside the downstream culture of the U.S., Mamdani reads as a curious Islamic socialist who refuses a neat ideological box. That shows up in his coalition, where he drew nearly 62% support from the foreign-born and won overwhelmingly among those who’ve lived in New York fewer than ten years.
Homegrown notes in his politics
There’s nothing surprising about the South African flavour in Mamdani’s politics. Born in Kampala, he moved to Cape Town as a child when his father taught at UCT, went to school here, and left for New York at the age of seven. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, the Ugandan scholar of colonialism and decolonisation, has long worked between UCT and Columbia. His mother is Mira Nair, the award-winning Indian filmmaker. He comes, then, from a cosmopolitan household with African values and Indian memory, two worlds steeped in anti-colonial thought.
So if we’re honest, his campaign promises aren’t wildly different from what we routinely hear in South African politics. It’s our familiar talk-culture. A cascade of grand pledges. Politics is still dominated by the biggest promise, and many voters seem to believe that if you repeat promises three times they will materialise like Betelgeuse in the 1988 film Beetlejuice.
That said, I’m generally wary of importing “lessons” from Western politics to South Africa. Contexts don’t line up neatly. Still, Mamdani’s run offers a few useful takeaways for our politics.
Global economic strain isn’t theoretical. For young people in big cities, purchasing power is anemic. Rent and everyday costs devour salaries, home ownership is out of reach, and couples delay having children for exactly these reasons.
In that setting, a pledge to freeze rents – as Mamdani proposes – can sound irresistible, no matter how damaging it proves in practice. Mamdani spots the real problem, but prescribes the wrong cure. The focus on economic pain is the very register that made Donald Trump effective in 2016 and again in 2024. In 2016 he harmonised economic discontent, industrial nostalgia, and anti-elite anger, and in 2024 he zeroed in on unchecked immigration, high living costs, and the sense that law and order are eroding: all issues that speak directly to everyday experience of Joe the Plumber.
Look at Argentina’s Javier Milei. He named the same day-to-day pressures, sold market reforms in plain language, and then did the boring technical work. After scrapping rent controls, the supply of rental units in Buenos Aires rebounded and nominal and real rents trended down in the short run, as previously withheld stock flowed back into the market. Preliminary but meaningful improvements.
Free-marketeers historically and, too often, still today are tone-deaf salespeople. They struggle to make their ideas sound attractive, even with a decent record. As the Canadian analyst Susan Delacourt argues in Shopping for Votes (2013), political marketing plays on emotion, not logic. Repeat a slogan (true or not) and it will lodge in the memory of a distracted public, and it slices a country into niche markets rather than doing the hard work of stitching a broad national vision.
Whether we like it or not, a politician’s first task is to secure a mandate and then implement. You must make your policy attractive if you hope to enact it. The lesson from Mamdani’s race is to speak directly to what voters feel in their bones, and to do so in language they understand with remedies they can picture.
The Milei add-on is that free-market principles can also be sold attractively, and when they win a mandate and are actually applied, they produce real change. You don’t need a leftward pivot to make affordability and other economic solutions popular.
Mamdani’s politics blend grievance with a bright, almost beaming optimism—very 2008 Obama. The anger at injustice is there, but the upbeat solutions are offered with confidence; (whether they’re realistic or beneficial is another matter).
His campaign was undeniably positive. On the campaign trail Mamdani was relentlessly upbeat, always smiling, arguably a touch too much, and even cordial with opponents. In our post-progressive moment, as populists of many flavours gain ground, politics often fixates on grievances, from struggling workers and a tax-exhausted middle class to alienated urbanites. But populists tend to be dour. They render politics a zero-sum cage match and as “us” versus “them”. So they are often willing to write some groups out of their coalition.
International experience suggests that a positive message can work. When hope is made concrete with simple steps, measurable milestones and a timeline, voters listen, even across ideological divides.
As South African politics confronts widespread state decay alongside apartheid’s stubborn legacy, especially as the ANC’s grip loosens, parties will have to walk that tightrope: acknowledge the rot and widespread state failure, but pair it with credible, optimistic solutions.
Parties that are candid about what they can deliver in a single term while still promising enough to inspire are likely to be rewarded.
Lesson 3: The horseshoe theory
Politics is changing; indeed, it always is. The Cold War map is now a poor guide. Those tidy left–right borders explain less and less of what actually bothers people.
The much-mocked horseshoe theory is edging into reality. Camps drawn for decades as opposites are now pointing to the same social and economic irritants, like the cost of living, oligopolies that set prices, unaccountable bureaucracies; a political class that looks after itself first. The Venn diagrams no longer resemble two crescent moons avoiding each other.
Centrists love the horseshoe caricature. It flatters them to insist that only the “extremes” abuse the state for gain as though the self-styled centre hasn’t perfected that very art. In polite company, it’s fashionable to blame every democratic ailment on “polarisation.” From op-eds to political-science seminars, one hears that “moderation” is the missing ingredient. But moderation is sterile when it’s the bureaucratic middle that’s failing.
That vacuum is exactly what the so-called extremes sense, crudely perhaps, but not incorrectly. The left–right spectrum, whether it is a straight line or arched horsehoe, is a thin map of political life. A better metaphor is perhaps linguistic. Politics oscillates between verbs—the things people do and feel (organise, protest, cut, build coalitions)—and nouns—the things that endure (institutions, statutes, budgets, contracts, settlements). The healthy horseshoe translates verbs into nouns, energy into reform, before it eventually hardens into the next orthodoxy.
These “shared” views across supposed extremes aren’t coincidences between irreconcilable camps. They expose how artificial those categories are. Most citizens are not simply “far right” or “far left.” They hold views that sprawl the spectrum, progressive on some questions, conservative on others, and pragmatic on most.
We cling to the old boxes because they flatter the political and commentator class, which prefers a neat moral geometry with themselves preening in the “virtuous” middle. It flattens a complicated reality into a false choice of reasonableness versus extremism or order versus chaos. But those boxes are drifting away from reality. The real fault-line today lies less between “left” and “right” than between those with a stake in preserving the present order and those who have lost faith in it.
The true horseshoe doesn’t arc between ideological poles but rather it links ordinary citizens long miscast as opposites, who are rediscovering a shared frustration with the same failing order.
Mamdani’s election offers South African politicians three lessons. If our parties take them seriously, they can translate anger and hope into policy that repairs the economy and restores service delivery. The only question is whether our political class still has the courage to promise less and deliver more. If not, the ballot box will have to do the teaching.
[Image: By Karamccurdy – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=151342482]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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