Is Gesture Politics Giving Way to Authenticity?

Authenticity beats high-vis vests in modern politics. But genuine authenticity isn't just showing you can relate to people - it's showing you genuinely believe in something bigger than yourself.

Gesture politics - the symbolic stunts and photo-ops through which politicians try to show they care - are not at all new, and they aren’t necessarily always a bad thing. The trouble is that these gestures don’t point to a vision for society or a solution to everyday problems, only to a vague identity: the hard worker, the regular bloke, the relatable dad on a paddle-board.

Practically everyone does it. No matter who’s in power, Britain’s top politicians seem to be permanently encased in high-vis vests or some equivalent. Nigel Farage clutches a lager; Keir Starmer cheers Arsenal for the cameras; Ed Davey falls off a paddle-board into a lake.

Politicians are increasingly perceived by the public to be two-faced and calculating. Recent studies describe a growing “authenticity gap”, between the public’s desire for relatable leaders, and their perception that the people in charge often act like it’s their first day on planet Earth. In many cases, bungled attempts to seem authentic misfire catastrophically - the public have highly-tuned ‘bullshit detectors’ and quickly sniff it out.

But there ARE exceptions.

The newly minted Mayor-elect of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, is certainly no stranger to gestures and signals. So much of his campaign was just that: Mamdani riding the subway (“I’ve got an ordinary commute”), ordering a ‘chopped cheese’ at his local bodega (“I, too, enjoy New York’s finest delicacies”), or laughing and chewing the fat with people on the street (“I’m listening to your concerns”). But none of it elicited the usual groans and eye-rolls.

Why is that? There’s been a lot of talk about Zohran’s natural charisma, communications skills, and of course his campaign’s masterful social media team. In a rare moment of harmony, there was something that the varying factions that make up the global progressive movement could all agree on - here was a valuable lesson in effective political communication.

But while we’re sure to see a rise in copycat campaigns of varying quality and substance, to focus exclusively on Mamdani’s sharp retorts and his team’s TikTok skills is to miss the more profound point.

Many mainstream politicians, on both sides of the Atlantic, have perfected the art of talking at length while saying nothing at all. They often stick to the scripts drafted by strategists and consultants. It’s been the great struggle of figures like Keir Starmer and (if I’m honest) Kamala Harris: how to sound human and natural while also ticking invisible strategic comms boxes and avoiding media minefields.

The result is that they often struggle to make real impact in serious interviews. They can come off as condescending and hollow - especially to the many who are already disillusioned - and they can completely short-circuit when faced with challenging questions on a nuanced or controversial topic like immigration or Israel-Palestine.

In this specific area, Mamdani seemed to take a leaf out of Trump’s playbook and lowered the guardrails. He approached his public communications with a broader goal that he prioritised over strategic caution and focus-grouped hesitancy. He can - and did - speak at length and off-the-cuff on a number of topics, not just showing that he was on top of his brief but coming off like he genuinely believed it. He showed a knack for steering any conversation back to his core platform of making New York affordable, because he was speaking from the heart and without those institutional constraints. Everything he said and did pointed back to the one central story his campaign was telling.

By taking this approach, Mamdani reinforced in voters’ minds the specific things he wanted to defend and improve - public transport, local businesses, affordable housing, and the multicultural ethos under attack by the Trump administration.

By contrast, Andrew Cuomo’s tone-deaf campaign saw him posing with his Ford Bronco and sweatily reassuring viewers that it isn’t the same one OJ Simpson famously escaped in. What message is the average voter supposed to take from that?

Here in the UK, Farage is perhaps the king of the ‘low guardrails’ game. He constantly evokes the “forgotten man,” the pub regular and the poor smoker left out in the cold. His pint and hunting attire tell a story: a nostalgic, exclusionary fantasy of a Britain before Brussels, “before” immigration, before things got so damn woke and complicated. It’s a pose of authenticity built on resentment, but it IS a strong vision.

Recently, however, a new challenger for Farage’s crown has appeared on the scene: Green party leader Zack Polanski. His authentic media performances have seen him labelled ‘Britain’s Zohran Mamdani’ and the Green Party surge to second place - behind Reform UK - in the polls. Polanski is able to speak about dry, technical subjects like the economy in a way that doesn’t leave the audience feeling excluded or falling asleep. He is comfortable speaking off-the-cuff in open conversation, even when put under intense pressure by unsympathetic media interviewers. And he’s the only party leader I couldn’t find a picture of in a high-vis vest (I suppose it’s early days for him…but let’s see).

The lesson to take from Mamdani’s win is less about instagram reels and more about authentic delivery of a genuine vision. Whether or not you agree with the left-wing populist anti-billionaire doctrine of Polanski and Mamdani, they’ve got something real to talk about - and the public are actually listening to them (a rare thing these days).

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