Political influence goes both ways across the Atlantic. But the United States is not Europe, and Europe is not the United States. Every effort to mirror one in the other has collapsed because their political traditions and social realities are as far apart as the ocean that separates them.
That’s why Europe isn’t about to see a wave of Zohran Mamdanis anytime soon. Mamdani is, in every sense, a product of American society, an eloquent answer to its own challenges. Europeans will have to find their own answers to their own problems. However, as wannabe Mamdanis emerge in the Old World— and they surely will—their impact will be far less dramatic than in New York.
In Europe, young, openly socialist candidates running for local office aren’t exotic. Calls for community groceries, affordable transit, and rent control don’t sound like revolutionary suggestions in the European political discourse. They barely even register as suggestions at all.
In Europe, radical politicians are relatively common. An immigrant, however, still struggles to be accepted, especially if they “dare” to be radical too.
Europe also has substantial immigrant representation in its political systems. In countries like Germany, parties such as Die Linke have long elevated first and second-generation immigrants to parliament and to city councils. But these politicians rarely move into leadership roles. They can be elected as progressive, or even distinctly radical, MPs, but they do not yet ascend to positions that require broader mandates, such as mayors of major cities or national executives. Those offices demand support from large, diverse voter coalitions that remain uneasy with a political figure who embodies both identities at once: immigrant and radical.
A March 2025 study by REPCHANCE found that people of immigrant origin remain significantly underrepresented in the national parliaments of Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Among these, the Netherlands has the highest share of immigrant-origin MPs (19 percent), while Spain sits at the bottom with just 2 percent. The report also shows a clear pattern: immigrant-origin legislators are disproportionately affiliated with left-leaning parties—most notably in Germany and Switzerland, and to a lesser extent in the UK and the Netherlands. By contrast, countries like Greece—despite hosting large Asian and African migrant communities over the past decade, and long being a destination for Balkan migration since the early 1990s—have yet to elect a single first- or second-generation immigrant to parliament, let alone to any position of local or national leadership.
Put differently, representation exists in Europe; transformative leadership, for now, does not.
As such, an immigrant who, against all odds—even within a deeply conservative party—manages to overturn the political status quo through a genuinely progressive platform and become the voice for a democratic majority horrified by the use of their tax dollars to fund a genocide is an unmistakably American story.
Here’s a risky prediction: long before immigrants with a distinctly radical message rise to prominence in major European cities or at the national level, members of those same communities will thrive on the other side of the political spectrum. Only through those affiliations will they be accepted by the “natives.” In fact, this is already happening.
Consider former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Few focused on his Asian background. Socially and politically, he couldn’t be cast in the familiar immigrant mold, as he was wealthy, elite, and a Tory. Or take London’s long-serving mayor, Sadiq Khan. In a few months, he’ll mark ten years in office and three electoral victories. Yet politically, Khan represents the Labour Party establishment, maintaining a “secure” distance from what’s left of the party’s radical fringe. Similarly, the views on immigrant integration of Iranian-born speaker of the Norwegian parliament, Masud Gharahkhani, are often cheered by deeply conservative audiences.
To be fair, even Zohran Mamdani, whose toughest battle was winning over his own party, seems unlikely to be elevated into Democratic Party leadership. His victory, deserved as it was, came as a surprise to much of the party’s establishment, and it is hard to imagine that it will suddenly convince Democratic leaders to back a national figure with Mamdani’s background and politics anytime soon.
That said, the European left still has a long way to go before it fields a leader who combines all the traits of Zohran Kwame Mamdani: Asian, immigrant, Muslim, outside Israel’s sphere of influence, socialist, and radical by his country’s political standards.