What does it mean to win politically in a fractured and postcolonial world? What does it take for a name, say, “Zohran Mamdani,” New York's new Muslim mayor, to come to signify not just a person, but a people, a project, a promise? From the perspective of Argentine philosopher Ernesto Laclau’s theory of hegemony, victory is never merely electoral. It is the achievement of representation, understood not as mirroring but as construction: of identities, demands and popular unity.
In "Hegemony and Socialist Strategy," Laclau and Mouffe argue that hegemonic politics consists in linking disparate social demands through a process of articulation, ultimately forming a chain of equivalence. The unifying node of this chain, the empty signifier, becomes the surface onto which different hopes and frustrations are projected. In such a scenario, “Mamdani” functions not only as an individual subject but as a singularity, a condensed sign of collective aspiration.
Yet this is not an act of passive reflection. Representation is an active, performative process. As Laclau later writes in "Contingency, Hegemony, Universality": “There can be no hegemony without representation. A particular group must incarnate the universal aims of the community ... Representation is, at its core, intrinsic to the hegemonic bond.”
This is why politics is never purely horizontal. There is always a need for figures, for names, to speak in the place of others, not because they erase difference, but because decisions must be made even when not all can be materially present. Or, as Laclau puts it: “A representative relationship becomes necessary at the point where decisions affecting people’s lives must be taken, even when they do not participate materially in the decision-making process.”
Mamdani’s symbolic ascent can thus be read as a hegemonic act: the construction of a “people” around a name that momentarily captures the frustrations of postcolonial marginalization, epistemic erasure and democratic yearning. It is through his ability to stand in for these unsatisfied demands, not as their solution, but as their articulator, that his “victory” becomes possible.
This is the Laclauian lesson: Political identity is not discovered but assembled. Representation is not distortion but creation. And victory is not a number, but a name that gathers the scattered into a singular “we.”