This time last year, Zohran Mamdani was a little-known mayoral candidate so desperate to raise his profile that he spent New Year’s Day plunging into the icy waters at Coney Island, hoping to use the social media stunt to promote his rent-freeze pledge.
Now, as the calendar turns again this week, there is no doubt that he has New York’s attention. On Thursday, up to 40,000 people are expected to crowd City Hall to watch his swearing in as New York’s next mayor, the largest inaugural crowd in decades.
The improbable rise has already been etched into the city’s history books. With a disarming smile and targeted platform, the 34-year-old Democrat mobilised young transplants, middle-aged bodega owners and many others around an ambitious affordability platform and toppled a Democratic dynasty.
Almost overnight, his victory made him an international phenomenon, as beloved by fellow South Asians in Bangladesh as in Brooklyn, and as polarising to Jews in Tel Aviv as in Manhattan.
On Thursday, after a two-month transition sprint, it will also officially make him the first Muslim and South Asian to govern America’s largest city, its youngest mayor in more than a century and the first democratic socialist to lead the hub of global capitalism in decades.
Yet for all the milestones and the only-in-New York boosterism that is certain to accompany the oath of office, what comes next will determine whether Mamdani will be viewed as the catalyst for a new era or as a failed idealist, soon forgotten.
His mandate is unusually clear. More than 1.1 million New Yorkers voted based largely on his promises to tame a growing affordability crisis that has made one of the world’s most expensive cities nearly unlivable for many working people. No mayor since the 1960s has won more votes.
Still, nearly a million New Yorkers voted against him, and rarely has a mayor taken office promising to deliver so much with so few assurances of needed cooperation.
Mamdani, a soon-to-be former assemblyman from Queens, will be reliant on governor Kathy Hochul, a moderate from Buffalo, and the State Legislature to generate the billions of dollars in new revenue needed to fund free buses, universal government-funded child care and other promises — all at a time when Washington is slashing funding to the city and state.
And as some of his predecessors have found, New York City with its eight million unruly people can sometimes seem almost ungovernable.
“Until you are in one of those jobs, you don’t understand the enormity of the day-to-day needs, and the complexity of the system,” said Steven M. Cohen, a longtime ally of and former state official under former governor Andrew M. Cuomo, Mamdani’s chief election rival.
New York Times News Service