After Tuesday night’s fairytale in New York, Zohran Mamdani began his new life vowing to be a mayor for everyone while the US political establishment and business elite continued to warily eye his startling ascent.
Although advance polls had predicted that Mamdani, the 34-year-old socialist Democrat, would crush Andrew Cuomo, a dynastic figure in New York politics, the joyous election-night scenes across the boroughs offered an alternative to the ironclad convictions about how US politics must work.
Mamdani’s election broke all kinds of records. He becomes the first Muslim mayor of New York – and his first year in office will coincide with the 25th commemorative ceremonies for 9/11. He is the youngest mayor of Gotham since Hugh John Grant in the 1890s.
He was born in Uganda, raised in relative privilege in the Upper West Side, is an ardent Arsenal fan and a neophyte state politician who ran a campaign without the help of the Democratic Party machine.
RM Block
He didn’t look or sound like a politician, but instead like an everyday New Yorker who emerged from the teeming avenues or subways to stand for the people – and they followed him in droves.
After a fiery election speech in Brooklyn on Tuesday night, Mamdani returned to the podium on Wednesday against the autumnal backdrop of the Unisphere in Corona Park, Queens.
“New Yorkers are facing twin crises at this moment. An authoritarian administration and an affordability crisis,” he said.
“And it will be my job to deliver on both. It will be my job to stand up for the city and also to ensure that we do not look to Washington DC as if it is the reason for all of the problems here in New York City. Many of the issues we are speaking about, they predate president Trump. They are issues that for too long we have turned a blind eye to or sought to rationalise, or normalise.”
Mamdani’s promises read like basic fair play rather than a radical socialist agenda: rent control, affordable grocery prices and childcare in a city where the costs for all three necessities have become extortionate. With a GDP of $2.4 trillion, New York boasts the biggest metropolitan economy in the world. But as its new mayor pointed out, “One in four New Yorkers live in poverty across the five boroughs.”
Sceptics will keep a close eye to see how Mamdani, who has scant political experience, will deal with the headaches that come with a city workforce of 300,000 as well as navigating state and federal opposition.
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He has already become a thorn in the side of president Donald Trump, irked by the idea of a “communist” running his home city and threatening to withhold federal funding for it.
Ironically, the core of Mamdani’s policies echo those flung around the US by Trump during his election campaign: to make life more affordable for American workers. So far, that has not happened and Mamdani’s rising star may be symbolic of a shifting mood among the electorate.
“I think the lesson for the president is that it’s not enough to diagnose the crisis in working class Americans lives,” Mamdani said on Wednesday in what will be the first of many spiky, indirect exchanges with Trump’s White House.
“You have to deliver on that crisis. This is a president that ran a campaign on the promise of cheaper groceries and now has gone so far as to cut Snap [nutritional assistance] benefits for close to two million-New Yorkers – someone who is making it harder to afford those same groceries whose prices he was decrying not so long ago.
“What scares Republicans across the country is the fact that we will actually deliver on this agenda, and the contrast is something they cannot bear to witness.”
