PARIS — Zohran Mamdani’s rise from little-known New York state assemblyman to front-runner in the New York mayoral election has sparked a newfound sense of optimism among left-wing politicians in Europe ahead of their own local elections next year.

Party strategists from across Europe are making the trek across the Atlantic to learn from the millennial who skyrocketed from anonymity to the precipice of the most important city in the United States (or the world, if you ask a New Yorker).

They want to see if Mamdani’s grassroots campaign, which has been laser-focused on affordability issues, will work in their cities and regions as well as it did for him in New York’s Democratic Party primary — and potentially in Tuesday’s general election.

Manon Aubry, the French co-chair of The Left group in the European Parliament — which gathers Europe’s democratic socialist, left-wing populist and some communist lawmakers — traveled to New York last week where she took part alongside Mamdani canvassers in the campaign’s final stretch.

Aubry and her party, France Unbowed, see Mamdani as an example of how to bring about “radical change” as they look to make a splash in the municipal elections that will take place across France in 2026.

Germany’s anti-capitalist party, The Left, sent four officials to the Big Apple to meet with officials including the Mamdani campaign’s chief of strategy, Morris Katz. Party Co-Chair Ines Schwerdtner and Maximilian Schirmer, co-chair of The Left’s Berlin branch, also paid a visit.

Liza Pflaum, parliamentary office manager for The Left’s other co-chair, Jan van Aken, said she believed her party had exceeded expectations in Germany’s February federal election by using the same playbook as Mamdani: focusing on cost-of-living issues, courting small donors, and investing heavily in door-to-door volunteer operations.

Pflaum expects The Left to use Mamdani’s current campaign as a model for her party’s approach to Berlin’s state legislative election next September.

“[He] offers a concrete vision of how people’s lives can actually be improved,” she said. “You can feel it right away here in New York: People have begun to feel hope again.”

Punchy beats boring

French and British politicians say they are particularly impressed with how Mamdani’s team has employed a media strategy leveraging their candidate’s charisma — especially the use of short social media clips to hammer home the affordability message while making him seem relatable.

“[Mamdani] winning the Democratic primary is already a major political event, both because of what he ran on and how he ran it: His comms strategy, his use of social media. There’s a lot of things we’ve found inspiring,” said Danièle Obono, a France Unbowed lawmaker who will be hosting a livestream watch party for the election results along with other party leaders on Tuesday.

Mothin Ali, deputy leader of the United Kingdom’s Greens, said British politicians tend to make “boring and simple” videos and that the left needed to perfect delivering sound bites in a “punchy” way like Mamdani.

Mamdani’s likely triumph over the experienced but scandal-plagued Andrew Cuomo — the former New York governor who is running as an independent after being defeated by Mamdani in the Democratic primary — is also the latest example of more moderate parties being outflanked by more radical forces at both ends of the political spectrum.

France Unbowed has established itself as a dominant force on the left in the decade after former Socialist President François Hollande’s single term ended in disappointment. But while France Unbowed leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon has had strong showings in presidential races, the party has struggled to take control of local administrations and to prove it can govern on a radical platform — a gap it hopes to close in next year’s municipal elections.

POLITICO’s Poll of Polls for the U.K. shows the Greens have climbed to 14 percent, just 4 percentage points behind Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. The latest Find Out Now poll, released last week, showed the Greens — boosted by new leader Zack Polanski’s brand of “eco-populism” — overtaking Labour for the first time.

Germany’s The Left’s has continued to rise gradually since its surprise showing in February and the party is now in a stronger position, polling shows, to challenge its moderate rivals, the Greens and the Social Democrats.

The Greens candidate for Paris mayor, David Belliard, said Mamdani’s success in appealing to voters worried about the cost of living, an issue plaguing Parisians as well as New Yorkers, had confirmed his suspicion that his party needed to run a more progressive campaign after spending more than two decades as a junior coalition partner to center-left mayors in the French capital who have done more to make the city greener than cheaper.

“We’ve spent a lot of time fighting against the end of the world, but maybe not enough helping people make it to the end of the month,” Belliard said.

Victor Goury-Laffont reported from Paris, Nette Nöstlinger from Berlin and Martin Alfonsin Larsen from London.