For decades, democratic socialism sat at the margins of American politics. However, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a new generation of online organisers, most notably the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, have pushed the label into the mainstream of Democratic Party debate, culminating this week in Abdul El-Sayed's primary victory in Michigan and a furious response from Republicans.
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez built the foundation
Sanders, now 84, has held elected office since 1981, when he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont. He entered Congress in 1990 as one of the few independents in the House, moved to the Senate in 2007, and ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2019, campaigns that popularised universal healthcare, higher minimum wages and free public college tuition among younger voters. Sanders describes his politics as an extension of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, distinguishing it explicitly from authoritarian, state-controlled socialism.
Ocasio-Cortez's rise came through a single upset. In 2018, at 28 and working as a bartender, she defeated ten-term incumbent Joe Crowley, then the fourth-ranking House Democrat, in a New York primary few expected her to win. A former organiser for Sanders' 2016 campaign and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, she became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress and one of the party's most recognisable progressive voices.
Hasan Piker and the streaming left
Raised partly in Istanbul and trained at The Young Turks, the progressive outlet founded by his uncle Cenk Uygur, Piker built an audience of several million on Twitch by streaming eight hours a day of political commentary aimed largely at young men, a demographic Democrats have struggled to reach. Pew Research has found that most Americans aged 18 to 29 now get news from social media rather than television or print, and Piker has positioned himself squarely inside that shift.
His involvement in electoral politics has grown accordingly. He addressed the DSA's national convention last year and campaigned directly alongside El-Sayed in Michigan in April, standing with him at a rally at Michigan State University that drew criticism from centrist Democrats, including comparisons some officials made between Piker and far-right commentators. Piker remains a divisive figure, having drawn platform suspensions and sharp criticism over past remarks, but his reach among young, disengaged voters is difficult for the party to ignore.
El-Sayed's win and the backlash
El-Sayed, a 41-year-old doctor who campaigned on healthcare, ending unconditional US aid to Israel and abolishing the immigration enforcement agency ICE, narrowly defeated the more moderate Representative Haley Stevens in Michigan's Democratic Senate primary, becoming the first progressive to win a statewide primary in a state Donald Trump carried in 2024. He will face Republican Mike Rogers in November.
Republican digital advertising branded El-Sayed the most radical Senate candidate in the country, and Trump used a Las Vegas speech to accuse progressive Democrats of representing a creeping communist threat, despite neither El-Sayed nor Michigan's other progressive primary winner identifying as a democratic socialist. The pro-Israel group AIPAC, which spent $32 million unsuccessfully opposing El-Sayed in the primary, is now weighing a further campaign against him in the general election.
A weaker story in Europe
The picture looks different across the Atlantic. Recent academic research on Western European left parties shows that traditional social democratic parties have lost working-class support over the past two decades, largely to parties on the populist right, while explicitly democratic socialist and radical left parties have generally struggled to grow beyond narrow bases. Slovenia's newly merged Left-Vesna alliance holds just five of 90 seats in parliament, and France's fractured left has splintered into competing blocs ahead of a primary later this year rather than consolidating around a single democratic socialist platform. Research published this year on Europe's democratic left broadly describes a story of long-term decline and uneven attempts at renewal, rather than the kind of surge Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and El-Sayed represent in the United States.
Cyprus has a different left entirely
Akel, the island's largest party of the left, traces its roots to the Communist Party of Cyprus and continues to describe itself as a Marxist-Leninist party, though its own constitution states its ultimate aim as "democratic and humane socialism." Analysts have noted that Akel has historically postponed any explicit socialist transformation until after a resolution of the Cyprus problem, distinguishing its politics from both Western social democracy and the newer, online-driven democratic socialist movement now reshaping American politics.
