‘Turning Left’: Mamdani, Polanski, and the Grassroots Renewal of Hope

Tom Lowe
Nov 11, 2025
4 min read

“Turn the volume up!” was the emphatic cry from Zohran Mamdani to (a likely enraged) Donald Trump as he celebrated his victory in New York City’s 2025 mayoral election. Mamdani, who rode a wave of grounded progressivism rooted in affordability all the way to City Hall, could not have chosen a more apt phrase to mark the moment. As he left the stage to the Bollywood classic Dhoom Machale, it became strikingly clear that it is indeed time to turn the volume up on the potential for real change, and pay attention to those who seek to enact it.

In the UK, Zack Polanski’s Green Party has seen a meteoric rise in the last two months alone, with the new leader taking advantage of Mamdani’s success to posit his own progressive agenda. Taking to X, Polanski congratulated the mayor-elect, saying: “His success will resonate throughout the world. A story where no one is left behind. It’s time to write that story across England & Wales too.”

For years, any genuine opposition to the right has sidelined progressive movements in favour of lukewarm neoliberalism. This can be seen most clearly in Keir Starmer’s underwhelming election victory, and Kamala Harris’ failure to keep MAGA at bay. With Labour taking a nosedive in the polls, and fatigue with the Democratic establishment continuing to sweep the US, the outsider successes of both Mamdani and Polanski have come as a welcome surprise for those seeking genuine change.

Now, I am by no means the first person to compare the two politicians, and I certainly will not be the last as they shape the landscape of the left in the year to come. However, for those who want to see the fight taken to Reform, who want to see Donald Trump face justice, who want an end to the bigoted rhetoric poisoning our society, it is important to understand how these men have ignited the flame to make progressivism popular again.

It’s a simple answer really - people. Both Mamdani and Polanski have placed ordinary citizens at the heart of their campaigns. From Polanski utilising Benjamin Zephaniah’s poem ‘The British’ in a voice-over celebrating the multiculturalism of Birmingham in response to Robert Jenrick’s hateful comments about Handsworth, to Mamdani taking full advantage of social media right up until election night, both men put genuine, relatable and underrepresented people first in their messaging.

This is not a novel formula for political success. Jeremy Corbyn’s focus on grassroots activism is what propelled him to the Labour leadership in 2015 and saw him improve the party’s fortunes at the ballot box two years later. However, the people-led pendulum eventually swung back against Corbyn at the 2019 election, with his failure to understand the importance of Brexit as a vital issue to the majority of voters sounding the death-knell for his time as leader. A campaign centred around the exhausting promise of a second Brexit Referendum was never going to be popular with a nation struggling to come to terms with the results of a first.

Even now, Corbyn has failed to learn from his crushing 2019 defeat, with his (or should I say ‘Your’) new party already falling victim to petty infighting and ideological superiority as Polanski shores up his position as the dominant voice of progressivism in the UK.

Polanski and Mamdani have proven that the best way to bring progressives together is to cut through the noise of moral purity and one-upmanship that has deafened left wing politics for almost a decade. Both politicians provide genuine alternatives to the centrist pandering of Starmer and Harris whilst building an extraordinary coalition of support from across the political spectrum.

These people-centric campaigns can be the future of the left in the years to come. As Mamdani prepares to enter the office of the largest city in the US, the Democrats will have to seriously reevaluate their options heading into the 2026 midterms. Meanwhile, Polanski’s Greens have surged to second in the polls whilst Reform plateaus, positioning them as a serious option for the disillusioned Brit in the next general election.

It has been easy for those on the left to feel hopeless since Trump returned to the White House. Not only has the President taken a flamethrower to the US Constitution and the concept of basic human dignity, but he has inspired a wave of bigotry that holds the West in a stranglehold - one only has to look at the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march in London to see this firsthand.

However, the election of Mamdani and the popularity of Polanski proves that this stranglehold can be weakened. Now is not the time for abstract ideological debates about the marginal superiority of one set of beliefs over another (I’m looking at you, Your Party), now is the time for real action, and it may just be that both a former rapper and controversial hypnotherapist are the ones to take it.