When Gen Z turned politics into the feed

Mamdani's insistence that New York is built by immigrants and now led by one taps a rich American tradition while provoking familiar anxieties

- Imran Khalid

“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.