Category: Uncategorized

by PELMAN SALEHI

Once a symbol of anti-imperial unity, BRICS now risks becoming the very thing Bandung opposed: a club of powerful states reproducing global inequality in a new key.

At the BRICS Dialogue with Developing Countries in Nizhny Novgorod in June 2024, South Africa’s then Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor, when asked about BRICS’s tangible support for African countries, emphasized the need to “expand dialogue capacities” and “create space for the voices of the Global South to be heard.” While diplomatically worded, her response clearly illustrated that even at the highest levels, BRICS remains distant from offering concrete support mechanisms for the continent. This symbolic exchange sets the tone for a deeper reflection on how far BRICS has moved from the founding spirit of Global South solidarity first articulated at the 1955 Bandung Conference.

In 1955, leaders of 29 Asian and African countries gathered in Bandung, Indonesia, in a landmark conference that challenged colonial domination and Western imperialism. The Bandung Conference sought to assert a new vision of sovereignty, solidarity, and self-determination among the recently decolonized nations. It laid the foundation for the Non-Aligned Movement, inspired Pan-Africanism and Asian-African cooperation, and gave voice to a moral and political alternative to Cold War bipolarity.

Seventy years later, as the BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) expands its membership and seeks to offer a counterweight to Western hegemony, many are asking whether BRICS represents a continuation—or a betrayal—of Bandung’s spirit. Is BRICS the heir to the anticolonial, egalitarian project of the Global South? Or has it become a pragmatic alliance of economic interests, untethered from the radical imagination of its predecessors?

BRICS, for all its symbolic importance and economic weight, has so far failed to articulate a coherent strategic alternative to Western-led globalization. It lacks not only institutional depth but also the ideological clarity and political will that Bandung embodied. Unlike Bandung, which was rooted in shared anti-imperial struggles and a commitment to moral leadership, BRICS has been hampered by internal contradictions, geopolitical caution, and elite-driven agendas.

The promise of Bandung was not simply unity among postcolonial states—it was a vision of global justice grounded in resistance to empire. Leaders like Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, and Nkrumah saw themselves as part of a world-historical movement. They were not merely defending sovereignty; they were articulating a new internationalism from below. In contrast, BRICS has often failed to speak with one voice on matters of war, peace, or development. During critical moments—such as NATO’s intervention in Libya, the Gaza wars, or coups in Africa—its silence has been deafening.

China and Russia, to be sure, have increasingly challenged US unipolarity, especially in the wake of the Ukraine war and rising tensions in the South China Sea. But their confrontations with the West are largely framed in realist terms: a clash of great powers, not a struggle for the oppressed. Brazil and India, meanwhile, oscillate between Global South rhetoric and integration into Western-dominated financial and security institutions. South Africa, despite its post-apartheid legacy, has not consistently mobilized the language of liberation in its foreign policy.

The expansion of BRICS in 2024 to include countries like Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Argentina was seen by some as a revival of its southern identity. But enlargement alone cannot resolve the bloc’s identity crisis. Without a shared political vision, BRICS risks becoming a loose consortium of discontent rather than a transformative force. The challenge is not simply to oppose the West—it is to construct an alternative rooted in the struggles and aspirations of the majority world.

There are signs of hope. The push for de-dollarization, efforts to build new development banks, and calls for UN reform reflect a growing impatience with Western dominance. Civil society actors, social movements, and intellectuals across the South continue to invoke Bandung as a source of inspiration. But the gap between elite summitry and grassroots solidarity remains wide.

To recover the spirit of Bandung, BRICS must do more than convene. It must commit to principles: anti-imperialism, economic justice, climate equity, and popular sovereignty. It must listen to the voices from below—from African farmers to Asian workers to Latin American feminists. Only then can it move beyond symbolism and offer a credible path toward a more just and multipolar world. Otherwise, BRICS risks becoming what Bandung opposed: a club of powerful states reproducing global inequality in a new key.

Africa’s role in BRICS remains complex and under-explored. While South Africa is a founding member, its ability to shape the bloc’s agenda has been limited. Countries like Zambia, burdened by debt and austerity, have looked to BRICS as a possible alternative to Western financial institutions—but with few concrete results. The New Development Bank’s track record in Africa remains modest, and many governments remain cautious about aligning too closely with Beijing or Moscow. Similarly, in West Asia, BRICS has offered no unified stance on the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza or the continued marginalization of Palestine. The bloc’s silence on these issues further distances it from the legacy of Bandung, which was rooted in anti-imperial solidarity and moral clarity.

Perhaps it is time to ask a more provocative question: Should we wait for states to revive the Bandung legacy, or has the mantle already shifted to grassroots movements, academic networks, and local struggles? From climate justice campaigns in Nairobi to feminist mobilizations in Buenos Aires, the postcolonial internationalism of the 21st century may no longer rely on elite summits. If BRICS is serious about honoring its southern identity, it must choose: replicate the hierarchies it once sought to dismantle—or rediscover the radical hope of Bandung through action, not symbolism.

Africa is a Country for more

by BEN WOOLLARD

A fateful visit to a market in Moscow entirely upended Tolstoy’s view on life and society—and changed the trajectory of his work and purpose.

On a visit to Moscow in 1881, Count Leo Tolstoy was horrified at the destitution he encountered. He’d seen poverty before, had witnessed beggars and country dwellers barely eking out a living from the land, burdened by taxes and rents. But he wasn’t prepared for the magnitude and raggedness of the city’s poor, nor for the extent of their persecution by the police. He was horrified to realize that the beggars in the streets had to ask for alms with caution lest they be arrested. On the advice of a friend, he went to the Khitrov Market, a center of poverty and homelessness. What he saw there permanently changed his outlook on life and society. Following the crowds of tattered men and women, he entered the free night-lodging house and spoke to those seeking shelter. Afterwards, he returned to his servants and opulent town house and sat down to a five-course meal.

The disjunction between these two worlds, that of the rich and that of the poor, disgusted him. He grew irritated at the thought of well-kept horses, decadent table spreads, and the lavish entertainment of theaters.

“I could not help seeing, in contrast to all this,” he wrote in What Is to Be Done? (1886), “those hungry, shivering, and degraded inhabitants of the night-lodging-house. I could never free myself from the thought that these conditions were inseparable—that the one proceeded from the other.”

At first, Tolstoy attempted to alleviate the suffering of the poor through charity. He took up collections and joined the census in order to find the needy on whom to bestow the alms of the rich. Yet he found money to be insufficient. Not only were many not in direct, desperate need of it, simply handing out bills only exasperated the system of exploitation and warped values that generated poverty.

“It is not enough to feed a man, dress him, and teach him Greek,” he wrote. A whole shift in values was necessary, one in which all learned “how to take less from others and give them more in return.”

Thus, Tolstoy began to question the very foundations of Russian society, a path of inquiry that led him ultimately to criticize the very basis of civilization as commonly understood. Combining such reflections with a radical, though idiosyncratic, Christianity, he articulated a new politics with prophetic fervor, a belief system best described as Christian anarchism.

The nineteenth century saw a flowering of anarchist thought with figures such as Proudhon, Fourier, Kropotkin, Rousseau, and others. Tolstoy was thus not unique in his espousal of the doctrine, though he gave it his own particular flavor. While there are no perfectly identical principles common amongst these thinkers, the political scientist R. B. Fowler observes that nineteenth-century anarchists can be broadly characterized by a “rejection of the familiar norms and structures, especially the political ones, of their age” and a belief that humanity ought to live free of government structures and in accord with nature—meaning both the environment and human nature more specifically. While nature was variously defined by different anarchists, most agreed that human nature ought to guide civilization and that human beings are basically good, intrinsically capable of harmony. Nature, therefore, and not individual will or desire, ought to be the guide. As Fowler outlines, in contrast to much contemporaneous Liberal thought, anarchists believed that personal liberty was best pursued socially, in a community free of government and living peacefully with the wider environment.

While for many nineteenth-century anarchists, human nature was understood in scientific terms, Tolstoy understood it religiously. His guiding principles were derived from his interpretation of Christianity, though he rejected much of orthodox doctrine, including Jesus’s divinity, the existence of angels, and the validity of the church. Instead, Tolstoy saw the meaning of Christianity primarily in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. As the economist Robert Higgs writes, the sermon can be summarized by the commandments “to love others as one’s self and to abstain from the use of force or violence.” These teachings, Tolstoy believed, formed the true essence of Christianity, which had been distorted by the church in order to protect its own interests. He thus rejected much Christian tradition, stating in The Kingdom of God Is Within You that “the churches are placed in a dilemma: the Sermon on the Mount or the Nicene Creed—the one excludes the other.”

This isn’t to say, however, that Tolstoy denied the existence of God or the necessity of the divine in human life. Rather, his whole conception of human nature and Christian life was based on the presence of God within each individual person, particularly in reason and conscience. As Fowler writes, Tolstoy believed “in the authority of the divine vested in man’s conscience.” It’s not so much human nature understood in isolation that serves as the basis for Tolstoy’s anarchism, then, as it is the presence of God within that nature, guiding reason and conscience toward a conception of life based on the love of all. True human freedom, for Tolstoy, consisted not in autonomy or power over one’s circumstances, “but in the capacity for recognizing and acknowledging the truth…and becoming the free and joyful participator in the eternal and infinite work of God, the life of the world.”

With this basis, and in keeping with the larger anarchist tradition, Tolstoy rejected many of the social structures of his time. In What Is to Be Done?, he described how his experiences with the Moscow poor led him to abhor the class divides that kept so many in poverty. He came to believe that the injustice he witnessed was caused by the refusal of the rich to labor. Having taken by force the goods of the peasants in taxes and rent, the rich congregated in cities. The peasants followed out of a need to earn a living, but they were frequently corrupted by the ideals of luxury and idleness exemplified by the rich, further driving them into poverty.

JSTOR Daily for more

by KIT KLARENBERG

As the dust settles on the “12 Day War”, it is ever-clearer that the conflict was a crushing defeat for Israel and the US. In retrospect, the Zionist entity’s sole success was a wave of assassinations in the conflict’s first hours. A fawning June 19th Financial Times report hinted cutting-edge technology drawing together diverse data and intelligence sources was responsible. This raises the obvious question of whether Tel Aviv was assisted in its murderous spree by notorious private spying giant Palantir.

An avowedly pro-Israel tech giant founded by Donald Trump confidante and ardent Zionist Peter Thiel, which reportedly provides artificial intelligence tech supporting Tel Aviv’s genocide in Gaza, Palantir’s tendrils extend typically unseen into almost every conceivable sphere of public and private life across the West. Moreover, the firm – launched with seed funding from CIA venture capital wing In-Q-Tel – has long-played a pivotal but barely acknowledged role in the International Atomic Energy Agency’s monitoring of Tehran’s nuclear research.

The interpretation Palantir was one way or another involved in Israel’s illegal “preemptive” war of aggression against Tehran is amply reinforced by the release of sensitive Israeli documents by Iran’s intelligence ministry. These files indicate the IAEA previously provided Israeli intelligence with the names of several Iranian nuclear scientists, who were subsequently assassinated. Additionally, current Association chief Rafael Grossi enjoys a close, long-running, clandestine relationship with Israeli officials. Subsequent disclosures could expose the IAEA’s dark alliance with Palantir.

‘Fishing Expedition’

In July 2015, the Obama administration inked the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Tehran. Under its auspices, in return for sanctions relief, the IAEA was granted unimpeded access to Iran’s nuclear facilities, to ensure the Islamic Republic was not developing nuclear weapons. Vast amounts of information on and within the sites, including surveillance camera photos, measurement data, and documents were collected along the way. The Association consistently found Iran was stringently adhering to the JCPOA’s terms.

Z Network for more

by ANILKUMAR PAYYAPPILLY VIJAYAN

They did not build the house of the Republic, but they now offer guided tours – all while chiselling away at its foundation with a smile and a flag.

There’s a classic paradox from vaudeville. Someone says to Emanuel Ravelli, “I used to know an Emanuel Ravelli who looked exactly like you.” Ravelli replies, “I am Emanuel Ravelli!” The other nods: “No wonder you look like him” (Animal Crackers (1930) Movie Script).

Circular logic dressed as insight – not unlike the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s approach to the Indian Constitution. The RSS says, “We don’t like this Constitution.” The marginalised reply, “But it guarantees equality and religious neutrality.” The RSS responds, “Exactly – that’s why we don’t like it.” Their posturing has all the guile of a child hiding behind its fingers, convinced no one can see it. Current Time 0:05/Duration 2:04 Advertisement

I like their innocence. It is so transparent, so childish. It lacks even the cunning of a Gandhi or the sinister depth of a Heidegger.

They seem to believe – in all seriousness – that Ambedkar fought to become an untouchable again, to proudly become what he was born into. That the child made to pull the bullock cart himself – then left bleeding by the roadside when it overturned – was not resisting caste, they say, but merely asking to be abandoned more politely. For a gentler fall.

A more dignified humiliation. That the man who was denied water, dignity, and humanity wanted a cleaner corner on the school floor, not the annihilation of the system that put him there. That the Constitution he drafted was not a weapon against graded inequality, but a kind of accommodation letter – a folded note of apology to Hindu society.

“One should become what one was!” – that seems to be the RSS’s dream for Dalits, Adivasis, and minorities. A return, not to dignity, but to assigned place. I’m not sure what the philosophical term is. Hegel’s teleological becoming? Or Heidegger’s authenticity? Or just ritualised regression dressed up as destiny?

Ambedkar stuffed and displayed

This is not misreading. This is a ritual purification of revolt, recasting fire as submission and rage as obedience. This is ideological taxidermy – hollowing out Ambedkar and stuffing him with docility. They preserve the external form (his image, his name, maybe a quote or two), but remove the substance – his radical anti-caste, anti-Hindu, pro-Constitution stance – and replace it with something completely tame and unthreatening. A lifeless, decorative version of a revolutionary.

The Wire for more

by BELEN FERNANDEZ

Invoking God to bomb Iran, Trump is reviving a deadly tradition of religiously justified US violence.

After ordering the United States military to bomb Iran last month, US President Donald Trump made a brief address at the White House to laud the “massive precision strike” that had allegedly put a “stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world’s number one state sponsor of terror”.

The speech, which lasted less than four minutes, ended with the invocation of God’s name no fewer than five times in a span of seven seconds: “And I wanna just thank everybody and in particular, God. I wanna just say, ‘We love you God, and we love our great military – protect them.’ God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America.”

Of course, the terminology deployed in the speech was problematic before we even got to the rapid-fire mention of the Almighty by a man who has never been particularly religious. For one thing, Iran simply lacks the credentials to qualify as the world’s “number one state sponsor of terror”; that position is already occupied by the US itself, which, unlike Iran, has spent the entirety of its contemporary history bombing and otherwise antagonising folks in every last corner of the Earth.

The US has also continued to serve as the number one state sponsor of Israel, whose longstanding policy of terrorising Palestinians and other Arabs has now culminated in an all-out genocide in the Gaza Strip, as Israel seeks to annihilate the territory and its inhabitants along with it.

But anyway, “God bless Israel.”

This, to be sure, was not the first time that Trump relied on God to sign off on worldly events. Back in 2017, during the man’s first stint as president, the deity made various appearances in Trump’s official statement following a US military strike on Syria. God, it seems, just can’t get enough of war.

Al Jazeera for more

by HAMID DABASHI

Tel Aviv and Washington will lose this battle with Tehran, and that failure will have a catalytic impact on peoples across the region

The pernicious deception led by the US charlatan-in-chief, President Donald Trump, culminated this weekend in a massive attack on the heels of unprovoked Israeli warmongering in Iran.

Israel’s aggression against Iran’s industrial infrastructure, along with its military and scientific leadership, has also killed hundreds of civilians – a trademark of the vicious Israeli army, on the model of what it has done in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

With the US directly entering the conflict on Saturday night with a stealth operation to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, this warmongering is now on steroids. 

The resolve of Iranians to defend their homeland will not leave a single stone unturned. Complicit Arab countries with active American military bases on their soil could face severe consequences for this attack on yet another sovereign nation in the region. 

Trump’s gaudy ruse of pretending to negotiate ahead of the weekend bombing was not just a silly political decoy. Israel is not an independent entity. It is a garrison arms depot, there to serve the interests of its owners and benefactors.  

Israel and its US and European enablers have spent decades manufacturing Iran as the top enemy, always on the brink of building an atom bomb to drop on Israel. This is a flat-out lie propelled by a settler colony that itself sits atop a massive nuclear stockpile, alongside a deadly arsenal of conventional weapons that have been used to devastate Gaza and commit genocide against the Palestinian people.

Any sane person would concur that neither Iran, nor Israel, nor any other country should ever have a nuclear weapon. 

But are the genocidal Zionists still engaged in the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians really in a position to point fingers at Iran and start bombing it? Is the US, the only country to have actually dropped nuclear bombs – on Japan during the Second World War – in that position? Are the Europeans, with their own heavy baggage of colonial fascism? Of course not.  

Middle East Eye for more

by JINOY JOSE P.

Dear reader,

“Suppose you were woken up from sleep one night and asked to prove that you were an Indian—what would you do?”

This is the question Aziz asks in an N.S. Madhavan short story—his voice rising, as a bureaucrat in Mumbai coolly evaluates his existence like a defective product. A ration card inspector has turned into a nationalist inquisitor. The village of his birth is declared too implausible to exist. And finally, when Aziz, born in 1971, says he wasn’t alive in 1970 (the cut-off year), it’s taken as an admission of guilt: that he must have arrived post-infiltration, and is therefore not Indian.

The story, “Mumbai”, is inarguably one of the most devastating portraits of state violence ever written in Indian fiction—not for its spectacle, but for its slow-paced, insidious cruelty. It is the story of a man stripped of his citizenship by smirk and insinuation, and not exactly by the law.

And, dear reader, it is no longer fiction.

Citizenship, across the world, has been a political tool more powerful than weapons. It helps those in power determine who can move, vote, own land, and more. Going deeper, it tells us who can dream, who belongs where, and who must die in waiting. In theory, citizenship is a contract between the state and the individual. In practice, it is a lever of control. The most powerful modern states do not need to expel you. They can simply erase your paperwork—and with it, your personhood.

We’ve seen this before. In Germany, after reunification in the 1990s, a new nationality law privileged jus sanguinis—right by blood—over jus soli—right by birth. Ethnic Germans from eastern Europe were welcomed “home”; Turkish workers who had built West Germany’s economy were left excluded and, in many instances, stateless. In Myanmar, the 1982 Citizenship Law reduced the Rohingya to “Bengali” interlopers. By 2018, over 7,00,000 Rohingya had been ethnically targeted and driven into Bangladesh. Many of those who fled carried no papers but memories of their homeland.

Wherever such events happen, the victims are denied education, healthcare, and legal protection. They simply cease to exist—in a legal sense. And that, precisely, is the violence: being alive but officially invisible. This systematic erasure, a phrase that’s become so redundant now, of legal personhood has been explored powerfully in both political theory and cinema. Hannah Arendt, writing after the Second World War, coined the phrase “the right to have rights” to describe the foundational function of citizenship. Once a person is stripped of their political belonging—what Arendt called “natality”—they become unprotected, unrecognised, and uncounted. Statelessness, in her view, was not just a legal condition but a metaphysical wound. It turned people into ghosts in the political machine—present, yet not present.

Closer to home, the 2019 Hindi film Eeb Allay Ooo! captures this ghostliness with eerie precision. Its protagonist, a young migrant employed as a government monkey repeller in Delhi, is invisible in every way that matters. He cannot access stable housing, medical care, or legal redress. He is a citizen on paper, yet his life is lived in the cracks of the state. The film is not about deportation, but about what happens when citizenship is so hollowed out that it becomes meaningless—when rights exist only in theory, and the daily experience of the citizen is one of exclusion, surveillance, and fear.

India has its own archive of such invisibilisation. And it has taken on a unique communal and electoral colour. Who gets to be Indian—and more precisely, who gets to be seen as legitimately Indian—is now a question decided less by law and more by lineage, language, and religious identity.

Frontline for more

by RICHARD S EHRLICH

The Cambodian strongman, ending his friendship with the family of PM Paetongtarn, dishes dirt on Thaksin Shinawatra, her father

BANGKOK, Thailand – Thailand’s politically powerful Constitutional Court suspended Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra on Tuesday (July 1) after accepting a case of alleged “ethical misconduct” against her because she criticized a Royal Thai Army commander in her leaked phone call with Cambodia’s de facto leader Hun Sen during their deadly border feud.

Paetongtarn’s suspension came after the two countries briefly clashed on May 28 and Thai troops shot dead a Cambodian soldier in the Emerald Triangle where eastern Thailand, northern Cambodia and southern Laos meet.

Paetongtarn apologized to the public and insisted she had “no ill intentions” when she clumsily tried to “negotiate” with Cambodia’s battle-hardened Senate President Hun Sen.

The Constitutional Court gave her 15 days to defend herself.

Meanwhile, to run this increasingly troubled Southeast Asian nation, she appointed Deputy Prime Minister Suriya Juangroongruangkit to become caretaker prime minister while the court decides during the next several weeks.

The court voted 7-2 to immediately suspend her after the nine judges voted unanimously to consider a petition by 36 appointed, pro-military senators.

The senators, referring to the audio clip from the phone call, claimed Paetongtarn’s behavior was “ethical misconduct” and “lacking integrity” when she spoke to Hun Sen while the border feud remains unresolved.

When the June 15 call was leaked, Thais were shocked to hear her criticize Thailand’s Second Army Region Commander Lieutenant General Boonsin Padklang while speaking to Hun Sen.

Her “derogatory remarks” and “submissive tone towards Hun Sen, with her signaling a readiness to comply with the Cambodian strongman’s demands,” were the reason for her political collapse, the conservative Bangkok Post reported.

Asia Times for more

by MARK CURTIS

The UK broadcaster is writing hundreds of articles on Iran’s budding nuclear programme while failing to inform the public about Israel’s actual nuclear weapons.

The BBC is failing to properly inform the public about Israel’s possession of nuclear arms, new analysis by Declassified shows.

The British broadcaster widely reported Israel’s attacks on Iran which began on 13 June, and US airstrikes on the country that took place on 22 June.

Both Israel and the US claimed their attacks, which are widely seen as illegal, were to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapons capability. 

But the irony of two nuclear armed-states attacking a non-nuclear state to prevent it acquiring such weapons appears to have been lost on the BBC. 

The British broadcaster appears to barely notice that Israel is a nuclear-armed state.

We analysed the BBC’s online reporting (excluding videos) for 13-26 June, looking at all articles tagged with either Iran or Israel, and found 103 articles and a further 821 short pieces in the BBC’s live written reporting. 

The possibility that Israel might possess nuclear arms is mentioned in just six of those 103 articles. In five of those six, there is a single sentence that often occurs as the last line of the article: “Israel is widely believed to have nuclear weapons, although it neither confirms nor denies this”.

Only one article, dated 18 June, contains a slightly longer consideration of Israeli nukes in its ninth and last section. This is a 96-word response to the question: “Does Israel have nuclear weapons?”, which is part of a “Your questions answered” piece that suggests BBC viewers might be interested in the issue. 

Its first sentence is: “There are estimates that it has about 90 nuclear warheads. But the real answer is we do not know”. 

It then repeats Israel’s position that it “neither confirmed nor denied a nuclear capability” and its final sentence says again that “there is no overt declaration by Israel” as to its possession of nuclear weapons.

Israeli weapons

While many of the BBC’s hundreds of articles about Iran quote Israeli officials on Tehran’s nuclear programme, the broadcaster is failing to consult independent sources of information about Israel’s nuclear arms. 

Swedish research institute SIPRI estimates that Israel has at least 90 nuclear warheads but that the number could reach as high as 300. Israel’s army, air force and navy are all assessed to be nuclear-armed. 

Various sources suggest that Israel’s submarines have been refitted to carry missiles armed with nuclear weapons. As long ago as 2012, German magazine Der Spiegel reported that “experts in Germany and Israel have confirmed that nuclear-tipped missiles have been deployed on the vessels”. 

Furthermore, SIPRI’s latest assessment is that Israel is “believed to be modernizing its nuclear arsenal and appears to be upgrading its plutonium production reactor site at Dimona” in the Negev desert.

Declassified UK for more

by SANDEEP SEN

Amid a global rightward shift, Mamdani’s progressive campaign offers a rare blueprint for the left to win.

Sitting in northern Europe, I shouldn’t care about the New York mayoral race.

Yet, despite all that is happening in the world, the contentious Democratic primary for the 2025 New York City mayoral election has found its way into conversations around me – and onto my social media feed.

This attention isn’t just another example of the New York-centric worldview famously skewered in Saul Steinberg’s 1976 New Yorker cover, View of the World from 9th Avenue. A genuine political struggle is under way, one that has the potential to reverberate far beyond the Hudson River. At its centre is the increasingly polarised contest between Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani.

The name Cuomo may ring a bell. He resigned as New York’s governor in 2021 following multiple allegations of sexual harassment. While he expressed remorse at the time, his political comeback has been marked by defiance – suing one of his accusers and the state attorney general who found the accusations credible. He claims the scandal was a “political hit job”.

Cuomo’s record in office was far from unblemished. He diverted millions of dollars from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), jeopardising the financial health of New York’s essential public transit system. He formed the Moreland Commission to root out corruption but disbanded it abruptly when it began probing entities linked to his own campaign. During the COVID-19 pandemic, his administration was accused of undercounting nursing home deaths, allegedly to deflect criticism of policies that returned COVID-positive patients to those facilities.

Given that legacy, one might imagine Cuomo’s chances of becoming mayor would be slim. Yet, he currently leads in the polls.

Close behind him is Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist and state assemblyman from Queens. When he entered the race in March, Cuomo led by 40 points. A recent poll now puts Mamdani within 8 points.

Born in Kampala and raised in New York, Mamdani is the first Muslim candidate to run for mayor of the city. But his significance extends beyond his identity. What distinguishes Mamdani is his unapologetically progressive platform – and his refusal to dilute it in the name of “electability”. His appeal rests on substance, charisma, sharp messaging, and a mass volunteer-led canvassing operation.

At the heart of Mamdani’s campaign is a vision of a city that works for working-class New Yorkers. He proposes freezing rents for all rent-stabilised apartments, building 200,000 affordable homes, creating publicly-owned grocery stores “focused on keeping prices low, not making profit”, and making buses free. He supports free childcare for children under five, better wages for childcare workers, and “baby baskets” containing essentials for new parents.

To fund these initiatives, Mamdani proposes increasing the corporate tax rate from 7.25 percent to 11.5 percent, and imposing a 2 percent income tax on New York City residents earning more than $1m annually.

He also wants to raise the minimum wage, regulate gig economy giants like DoorDash, and protect delivery workers. His plan to establish a Department of Community Safety would shift resources away from traditional policing towards mental health and violence prevention.

Al Jazeera for more