Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani's policies as 'normal'
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Its also conveniently leaving out the policy ideas on reducing policing, and introducing mental health crisis workers which have been tried in the US (SF) and worked disastrously.
That's a pretty important difference you're eliding. "state run" is where most of the objection is. Coops get nowhere near the pushback (if any) that state run businesses (ie. "communism") get from Americans.
"state" in this case refers to "government", not US "states". You see this type of usage elsewhere, for instance "state" schools[1], which are often operated at the city/county level, not state level.
Schools operated at the city/county level are called public schools in the US, no? So in the same vein these stores should either be called public or city stores.
Note that the Guardian article instead talks about "city-run" and "municipal-run" grocery stores. And the reason I'm mentioning this is that "city-run" sounds harmless while "state run" is exactly what you mention: "Coops get nowhere near the pushback (if any) that state run businesses (ie. "communism") get from Americans."
Right, I'm pointing out that "state" in the english language isn't limited to just US states. If you're not convinced by that, there's also "state" owned enterprises in countries that don't even have "states" (eg. China).
>Note that the Guardian article instead talks about "city-run" and "municipal-run" grocery stores. And the reason I'm mentioning this is that "city-run" sounds harmless while "state run" is exactly what you mention: "Coops get nowhere near the pushback (if any) that state run businesses (ie. "communism") get from Americans."
The only difference between municipally and states owned enterprises (both the US state kind and "government" kind) is in scale. Objections to state ownership mainly revolve around state coercion (you can't opt out of a municipal grocery store, especially if it's funded by tax dollars), and potential for self-dealing. Both these concerns exist for municipal grocery stores, but not coops.
> in countries that don't even have "states" (eg. China)
China is the state.
On policing, Urban Alchemy is the company that was contracted in SF. Having worked directly with Urban Alchemy for years in LA, their staff are severly underqualified and 95% of the time will do nothing once arriving on site. The most I've ever seen them do is break up a fight. Is doing nothing better than actively harming people and making the situation worse, as the police often do? Yes. Is it improving the situation? No. Also, what is your definition of success? No first responder can prevent a crime from happening, all responders arrive after crime has occurred. Putting people into cages as the only option actually leads to worse outcomes for crime. And after decades and billions of dollars spent on the failed war on drugs, we know that is not a viable or successful approach. Part of the job these alternatives are supposed to be doing, is addressing root upstream causes of crime.
On the other hand, the alternative to policing pilot in Denver, Support Team Assistance Response (STAR), has been a wild success.
I've never understood this claim. Are you unaware of the concept of deterrence, or do you reject that it exists?
Mamdani and politicians with similar 'progressive' positions are those advocating for reducing them (either through budget cuts, or moving resources to worse initiatives), while the most robust studies on crime have shown beat cops to be pretty effective for reducing crime (see the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment, and other meta analyses)
Denver is the best example in the US that saw limited success, and one of the very few - in most places similar approaches were tried (in the US), we were worse off then just keeping police as the primary responders. In NYC specifically we tried a pilot recently, and it was (unsurprisingly) ineffectual - where police had to be called as backup 65% anyway(https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-of-the-behavioral-...). So no in NY at least police don't make the situation worse thats a myth.
Is that the case with groceries?
It's so thoroughly different in goals from the NYC plan that I'm in awe people would conflate them.
[1] For example Seven Deadly Zins wine is $19 in NH, currently very on sale for $13. Or its just $11.49 at Total Wine in Mass without any sale at all! Ketel One vodka is $38 in NH, or $28 in Mass.
NYC tax revenues are not growing and even optimistic estimates of the proposed tax increases (which the mayor doesn’t have the power to impose anyway) top out at $8 billion.
This is the epitome of magical thinking. Even with the most optimistic estimates of revenue increases and conservative estimates for the proposed spending, the numbers are miles away from adding up. And we’re talking about some municipal grocery stores? Like even if he really screws it up, the cost is probably only in the hundreds of millions.
"Zohran’s revenue plan will raise the corporate tax rate to match New Jersey’s 11.5%, bringing in $5 billion. And he will tax the wealthiest 1% of New Yorkers—those earning above $1 million annually—a flat 2% tax (right now city income tax rates are essentially the same whether you make $50,000 or $50 million). Zohran will also implement common-sense procurement reform, end senseless no-bid contracts, hire more tax auditors, and crack down on fine collection from corrupt landlords to raise an additional $1 billion."
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14-aM9DKG337SDMilmfQtLRR-pDw...
Would be great if Democrats can stay the party of serious governance and not style drift to the post-truth style embraced by modern Republicans. I’m glad we’re nominating young, charismatic candidates, but we need to stay in reality.
For a more sober look at the proposals (you sent a link to campaign material) see https://www.cato.org/blog/mamdanis-wishful-thinking-tax-reve...
I've read it has worked very well, though not necessarily in SF in particular. Do you happen to remember where you read that?
It's hard to imagine why having mental health professionals address mental health problems would be a bad idea.
Could you point out if I'm missing something?
The general points i'm trying to get across is
- Responder safety/back-up needs mean you can’t fully “swap out” police. This program still needed to bring in police most of the time. - Coverage and scale are hard in an actually big city, like NYC. (also why denver's success in a tiny city is sort of a useless comparison)
So why not just equip police to better handle mental health cases instead of creating a different task force which doesn't have any of structure the police already has? This isn't rhetorical - the reason is idealogical stubbornness, there are better solutions for achieving mamadanis goals.
I don't think so: Pick something that supports your claim. Right now it looks like you linked to it without even knowing what it said, hoping nobody would read it and you could claim some authority.
> Responder safety/back-up needs mean you can’t fully “swap out” police. This program still needed to bring in police most of the time.
The audit specifically says that they can't evaluate that; they don't know because they lack the appropriate data.
Is there something else you base that claim on?
> why not just equip police to better handle mental health cases
Because it takes a lot of training that police don't have time or possibly the propensity for. Even police have long complained that they are given jobs that they aren't suited for.
> the reason is idealogical stubbornness
You answered your own question with that ... there is nothing more I can add!
99pi has a nice podcast on food deserts. It puts the blame on the decision from the FTC to stop enforcing the Robinson-Patman Act, and only use consumer prices as the metric for antitrust rulings.
This is more one of the causes: Too much theft so they cut their losses.
There's obviously the failure mode of California where no town wants to have new homes and all of them want jobs, so perhaps the state is the right level for this.
But I think they are "normal" left wing policies in Europe in the sense that parties in various countries/cities/regions have campaigned on them or implemented them.
But my understanding of some US media is these are depicted as borderline communism.
Also shows you they had to search far and wide to find examples.
Free transport? Tallin, Estonia (presumably the only capital city), population: 450k
Government-run grocery stores? Turkey (barely even Europe), only accessible to the poor
Free childcare? Portugal, introduced in 2022, and hardly universal: while the program is open to all, places are limited and can be tough to access
Rent freeze? Established in Berlin in 2020, ruled unconstitutional in 2021.
In other words, garbage article and extremely clickbaity (and lying) title.
Rent freeze is in place in many cities in France (although this is not exactly a "freeze" but rather a "regulation")
Free transport is in the talks (but don't hold your breath)
Others have already quoted the milk bars all across Poland.
The Netherlands has childcare benefit for the poor that covers 96 % of the costs.
Many European countries have some forms of rent freeze or rent cap. Biggest recent example is Paris since 2019.
I think more examples will follow when my fellow Europeans are on their state mandated lunch break.
If two Europeans recognize it as normal the headline is correct.
If you really want to drive down the cost of housing figure out cheap windows or start convincing people they don’t need nearly as many of them.
Don’t believe me? Compare the cost of a large 2 story prefab shed ~10-20$/sf without amenities like plumbing vs a house of similar size.
But my point was more that price savings are easy to slip into the new construction pipeline for a wide range of homes. Similarly Argon helps r with insulation on day 1, but only lasts ~20 years on a window that may be in use for 100.
Become communist (or communist lite) and reserve land ownership to the state, lock land price to its productive capacity (as assessed by the state), mediate sales and usage taxes based on the same. Prevent resale/sublet between individuals. Allow transfer of control only from individual -> state -> individual.
Or use a regulatory approach where only the state can set the price of land, and the price is based on well-defined factory (productivity, proximity to population centers, population density, etc).
All value in an economy arises from real estate. Real estate (and the related businesses, including banking and lending) drive all economic activity in the world.
Since land belongs to everybody and to no one, perhaps we should let the government decide what to do with it. Or at least promote more co-op housing and land trusts.
However it's not politically viable to advocate that as a policy solution without a stopgap policy to make progress in the interim.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/real-estate/high-housing-co...
That being said, I like all the named policies in this story, and of course we could have them if we have a moral country. Mamdani says a lot of random, stupid (other than these policies), trendy stuff though: the proof will be in what is done. Free public transportation would have a positive ripple effect across the entire country, along with city run groceries for food deserts.
I do not think it is a good article. Quite a few posts indicate the flaws.
I find it almost quaint that we are still concerned about whether buses should be free. (No, for the record I don't think buses should be free, but honestly, who cares? In today's America, any elected representative willing to give a middle finger to Trump is a step in the right direction. We can fix buses later.)
The general pitch is “raise taxes to make life more affordable for all”. That’s an idea Europeans can identify with.
To a point, when we stop seeing a social benefit from our taxes, it starts to look more like theft.
It’s not like Mamdani snuck into power. Voters chose him specifically on the agenda he proposed. Why would they revolt?
Seems you completely missed the point.
Which New Yorkers do, because they just voted.
I guess I did miss the point because from where I’m standing this is all a big non sequitur.
“Mamdani seeks to raise taxes and spend the revenue on subsidizing services used by all. This is similar to an approach seen often in Europe”
“Did you know that if you tax people too much they revolt”
…okay?
Do you not have elections?
come on
That doesn’t mean democracy is a failure, it just means your opinion is in the minority.
My point was about the degree of taxation.
If it's any consolation, I probably pay similar tax rates to France, and get way worse services.
Why are you using the American revolution as an example? Like in what way is that remotely relevant? The revolution was the result of an actual denial of representation for all colonists, it wasn't about the general dynamics of a democracy in which the majority that wins an electon gets to set the rules that the minority must abide by - there was no election at all, only the rule of the British monarch.
If you were talking about DC or Puerto Rico where they actually have taxation without representation then there'd be some merit to your point, but you're not so there isn't.
I live in Switzerland. Here the general population have about as much a say about tax as one can imagine, from federal to municipal (gemeinde) level. And guess what? You'll find people here who are very upset about the taxes they pay.
If people don't like a tax policy, they can vote against it. What they absolutely CANNOT do is try to instigate a revolution because the majority voted contra to their desires. That is not how democracy works.
I don't see a difference, fundamentally it comes down to consent of the governed. If 51% of a country votes for something, and it doesn't happen, then what's the point in voting?
Yes, what you're describing is democracy. Yes, the premise of the system is that the majority vote decides on the rules/policy. Yes it would be bad if that were subverted.
But, for like the billionth time now:
- this is not what just happened with the NYC vote, and - it has absolutely nothing to do with the American Revolution.
If you're still somehow confused, I suggest reading up on these topics - Wikipedia [0][1] provides a wonderful start.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_New_York_City_mayoral_ele... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution
nice, exaggeration, and more misrepresentation, see ya
I was never talking about NYC, you assumed.
Kentucky voters were wondering why polls weren’t open Tuesday to vote in these elections, for example, so someone being wildly misinformed about policy proposals or their mechanics would come as no surprise.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/kentucky-politician-had-...
https://x.com/KYSecState/status/1985734353515671601
> We’re getting calls about polls being closed. They are closed because we do not have elections today. Kentucky votes next year. You cannot vote today in Kentucky for the mayor of New York City or the Governor of Virginia. Sorry. — Michael Adams, KY Secretary of State
https://www.mta.info/guides/riding-the-bus/fare-free-bus-pil...
> From September 24, 2023 to August 31, 2024, five MTA bus routes — Bx18A/B, B60, M116, Q4, and S46/96 — were fare-free. Passengers on these routes were able to ride without paying the fare.
> The purpose of the pilot was to study how fare-free service affects ridership, access, equity, and fare evasion. It was made possible thanks to funding from the New York State FY2024 budge
Europeans are not a single opinion entity that is left wing, don't work past 5pm and read Sartre at night, after the union meeting.
Moreover, modern rights are often economically more to the left than modern lefts are (see Meloni, PiS in Poland, etc).
The article in general takes the approach of listing a small handful of (usually very small) polities that have one of Mamdani's proposed policies, and then claim that the full suite is therefore "normal" across Europe.
1. Europe is not socialist (Eastern Europe and the USSR were). And, no, social-democracy is NOT socialism.
2. The welfare state is essentially bankrupt in many European countries.
3. Socialism cannot, ultimately be democratic.
My only sane interpretation for an election of a socialist candidate in 2025 is that this is a protest vote not an adhesion to socialism...
Norwegians self identify as socialist for example.
Er.. that's not even remotely true
If they call themselves "socialist" then I will too.
Granted though, that under a functioning democracy, there will be overlap: if the country is x then most likely at least a plurality of voters support x. It doesn't mean that "all citizens support x" or "any specific citizen supports x and self identifies themself an x-ist".
To be clear, the former is what I was repeatedly told. Nobody personally self-identified themselves as a socialist to me, they described their country as socialist.
Consider that your assumption that Norway is not socialist is incorrect. Just because Norway may not meet whatever definition the Heritage Foundation is telling you when you look it up, doesn't mean that Norway does not nevertheless use the word "Socialist" to describe their own government.
If not, it does highlight something worrying: Too many people either don't understand what "socialism" means or, perhaps even worse, think you can make it mean whatever you want it to mean.
Gosh, you should tell the Norwegians! I'm sure they will want to know that their government doesn't meet your preferred objectively-universally-correct definition of "socialist" and so they should stop calling themselves that.
Personally I have no issue with it in the same way I have no problem with Americans calling their government a "democracy".
2. The US government is essentially bankrupt, and has been spending far beyond its means for decades.
But countries are not households. Sovereign countries cannot run of money. But they can run out of confidence.
For a nation state, bankruptcy happens when its currency is no longer respected and essential imports become so expensive they cause hyperinflation.
By any objective measure, the US today is closer to that today than Europe. (It's mostly the fault of tariffs, but the cause doesn't matter.)
It's true the influence of neoliberal lobbying and opportunism by US corporates has reduced the effectiveness of welfare in the EU. But health and benefits are still higher, and the only country where insured health costs bankrupt 500,000 people a year is the US.
All of those things _tend_ to be free only if you can't afford them, are a single mother/father. Average childcare in my area is 900 euros per month, which is a lot in Italy where average salary is twice than that.
Public one exists, getting in is hard.
As for him claiming to being a socialist I don't find anything wrong/strange with it. US really needs this kind of politicians too.
The point is that most of his policies are part of the normal churn of debate in a great many countries and are not seen as extreme, even if not implemented.
eg: "Free" public transport is a thing in Queensland, Australia.
( Okay, it's actually 50 cent flat rate fares: https://translink.com.au/tickets-and-fares/50-cent-fares .. so lets call that 'nominal' )
NYC has time and again resisted calls to dismantle the current child care program, which costs the exchequer around $3b [0]. Mamdani's plan is to take the current child care program and make it "universal" at $6b.
> we need to buy tickets to ride the bus
Again, not without a precedent as MTA has ran some routes for free for many months. Besides, MTA sees 40%+ fare evasion, but MTA needs to pay the bills somehow, and Mamdani's proposal, which may go no where, is that rises in corporate tax will fill this ~$800m hole.
> rent freezes don't work
Depends on what the sought / desired outcome from rent regulation is. In Mamdani's case, it apparently is a stop-gap to control cost of living for the working class, until enough newer housing units can be built despite NIMBYs [1].
[0] https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-nycs-publicly-...
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/11/mamdani-...
NYC has subsidized world-class transit, rent-stabilization, high taxes and free-childcare. Pretty European.
Zohran is classic of case of 'the dose makes the poison'. Instead of subsidized buses, he wants free buses. Instead of rent-stabilization, he wants rent freezes. He wants to increase an already high tax rate in a city that's bleeding billionaires to Florida. NYC spends an eye-watering billion dollars on child-care subsidies, and Zohran's intended expansion will add billions more in costs.
NYC has European public services with American over-regulation. It would be untenable unless it were the world's richest city. Thankfully, it is the world's richest city. But, that doesn't mean that NYC's systems are efficient. It means that the city hopes to get away with policies (some forcefully imposed on it by the state) that no other place would because it assumes the money train will never end.
NYC is better run than American suburbia and California. But, NYC doesn't have California's infinite money glitch or the ruthless demographic segregation of suburbs. So, efficiencies must be found in policy making.
I think Abundance does a good job of summarizing the problems (over-regulation) and suggesting solutions (de-regulation). But for some reason, democratic socialists refuse to engage with the book earnestly.
Economic historian Trevor Jackson engaged with Abundance (together with eco-radical book Overshoot) in the September issue of the American left-ish publication NYRB, if you're curious about an earnest essay [0].
Since it's behind a paywall and the Overshoot book also gets reviewed, I picked out the most substantive quotes to highlight the actual critique:
> The evidentiary core of each chapter consists of a summary of the academic work of a few experts, usually economists, with frequent and lengthy quotations, as well as the occasional interview, whose conclusions are repeated uncritically. (To take one example, they quote without scrutiny the claim of Zoom CEO Eric Yuan that he is requiring employees to work in person in order to foster trust, rather than to impose discipline or to recoup the costs of commercial real estate.) They give no sense of the unruly literatures on their subjects, the ranges of disagreement, the difficult problems and mutually exclusive solutions. They claim to set an agenda for a new liberal political order, but what they have done is read some economists and argue, again, for deregulation.
> Klein and Thompson are opposed to redistribution, which they refer to as “parceling out the present” and which they claim is “not enough,” and instead of imagining “social insurance programs,” they propose that we make “technological advances.” [...] Klein and Thompson do not seem to realize that their proposals would also entail large-scale redistribution and that the ills they seek to cure are the result of inequality rather than regulation, because they do not seem to understand how prices and property work in capitalism. Translating higher profits to shorter workweeks would require a scale of redistribution that far outstrips anything Bernie Sanders has proposed. Claiming that profits will be shared because they are based on “the collective knowledge of humanity” opens up a wider set of imperatives than they realize. Most profit, labor, and technology is in some way built on the collective knowledge of humanity, in the sense that education, work, and knowledge are shared, social, and cumulative, and all workers are the result of collective social reproduction.
> They devote no serious thought to the basic political problem that homeowners are a large and powerful constituency, especially at the local level, who are likely to oppose (or already do oppose) the reforms Klein and Thompson suggest because driving down the cost of housing will drive down the value of homes. That constituency has produced undeniably regressive politics—which is a political fact to be reckoned with. So must the fact that homeowners organize to protect their asset prices because decades of American policy have used mortgages to substitute for the welfare state and wage growth. Any plausible agenda to drive down the cost of housing is going to require things like social housing, rent controls, and some mechanism to keep Blackstone and other private equity giants from buying up all the new housing and holding it empty until prices rise. Housing abundance calls for redistribution, in other words, as well as an aggressive state willing to confront property owners ranging from homeowner coalitions to asset managers.
> Klein and Thompson likewise seem unaware that technologies are owned by people. Despite an entire chapter on the problems of scaling technologies to mass consumption, they do not pause to consider that the self-driving cars, the lab-grown meat, and the solar electricity of their imagined future will be property, whose owners will have an interest in higher profits, higher rents, and higher prices. Klein and Thompson’s agenda is predicated on avoiding distributional conflicts by increasing supply so as to lower prices, yet they do not address the problem that lower prices are good for buyers but bad for sellers, and therefore are themselves a kind of distributional conflict, though one mediated through markets instead of politics. Their faith in markets is axiomatic. In passing, they describe “modern liberal politics” as an effort to “make universal” a set of “products and services.” Not justice, equality, dignity, or freedom, but products and services. This is the vision of the future that has attracted millions of dollars to remake the Democratic Party.
> Klein and Thompson do not cite but bring to mind John Maynard Keynes’s 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” which also imagined a future of abundance and shorter workweeks. Keynes predicted future GDP almost perfectly, but he thought economic growth would be widely shared, and his future included a solution to technological unemployment as well as the end of the accumulation of wealth as a source of social importance. Klein and Thompson do not consider why this future was superseded, and now, ninety-five years later, they set out to imagine it again, believing the past is a long trajectory of technological progress temporarily held back by regulation and social protections enacted by procedural liberals. For them, the relation of the past to the future is part of a story of overcoming, not a tragedy of lost possibilities. They are right that much of the blame for our current predicaments can be traced to the forms of liberal governance since the 1970s, but they are mistaken to blame, more specifically, its predilection for environmental regulation and building codes. Rather, it is the way liberal politicians have either acquiesced to or actively encouraged the rise of an unaccountable tech and finance oligarchy that now threatens the continued existence of democracy itself and that claims a monopoly on the capacity to imagine and create the future.
[0] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/09/25/how-to-blow-up-a...
You're not as informed as you think you are, probably because you're not an NYC resident and have no actual stake in this election. We successfully passed 3 ballot proposals that reduce regulation and review time for building certain housing units. Mamdani voted for all 3 also. More deregulation is needed and expected under Mamdani - not to the tune of enriching developers, but for building actual affordable units.
Side rant: A lot of people on HN talk about building more supply. And we do - if you've lived in NYC for an appreciable amount of time, you'll know how different LIC, Greenpoint/Williamsburg, Downtown BK, and Gowanus (among others) look like after 10 years of intense development. Despite receiving tax breaks (421a), most units are not affordable. They're also incredibly cheaply built and generally unpleasant places to live, chock full of excessive amenities that drive up the rent. There's a balance here between freeing developers and allowing them to run buckwild with "affordable" 5k/mo studios. It's easy to quote Paul Krugman on HN about supply side housing and rent regulation but there's more to the story here than just "build more".
I know that Mamdani is more than the 4 policies he's championed as part of his social media campaign. But, he has championed those 4 policies a disproportionate amount - free buses, free childcare, freeze rent, raise taxes. A man must be judged by what he says. I judge him by what he says the loudest.
______
For your side rant, I don't agree. New builds in gentrified neighborhoods aren't perfect, but they're significantly better than the brick kilns that came before them. I've crashed at friends houses in Gowanus before the gentrification boom, and it was miserable.
Williamsburg & Bushwick should be seen as a triumph. It went from a dilapidated industrial zone where my friends dad 'got beat up by gang members when he was growing up' and now it is the thriving center of the American hipster movement. Domino Park is triumph. It is noticeably better maintained than parks elsewhere in NYC, and that's thanks to the public-private partnerships.
New build units aren't affordable because those are the only new builds coming up. When supply is low, there is no govt intervention that can give a good outcome to the majority. If those builds hadn't come up, prices would've gone up further in other places or worse, people would have moved out of the city. It's a math problem. People need homes. There aren't enough homes.
That's the whole point of abundance.
There is no such thing as an affordable & scarce resource. It doesn't matter is the scarcity comes from over-regulation or impractical building costs. You can artificially make it affordable by rationing it to the lucky few. But, its limited availability means that a small group gets all the benefits (see classical rent control in NYC) while the majority in the same socio-economic class is left subsidizing their life style.
I can give real examples.
Take Chicago for instance. New affordable housing is more expensive than market rate housing due to over-regulation. [1]
Take Austin. It reduced regulation and zoning rules. Rents went down. [2]
Take Amsterdam, Rent control has taken a bulk of apartments off the housing market, making new builds eye-wateringly expensive. [3]
[1] https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/07/28/why-is-it-so-expensi...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
_______
I concede that Mamdani may still endorse a de-regulatory policies. However, the left has historically leaned pro-regulation. I will maintain this prior until proven wrong. I desperately want to be proven wrong, because I want to continue living in NYC. If Mamdani had gone around saying Rezone, Deregulate and Build, then I would have expressed confidence. But he has been quite evasive about these policies when asked by various interviewers over hours of listening to him.