Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York who managed to embody in record time both Donald Trump’s hope for change in the United States and the challenge to the established power of his party, made history on Tuesday. At 34, Mamdani becomes the first socialist to govern the destinies of the world capital of capitalism and the first Muslim mayor of the city hit by the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Also, the youngest to achieve it in a century.
His victory has few precedents in a city that has elected 110 mayors before him – only a handful of them, immigrants – and where almost no one knew him just a year ago. So he was simply a regular member of the State Assembly from Albany. From that discreet place, Mamdani has rocketed to global fame on the back of a left-wing agenda – sensible or populist, depending on how you look at it – based on a commitment to affordability that was confirmed this Tuesday as irresistible to those neighbors who are pushed every day little by little beyond their limits by the most populous city in the country (8.8 million inhabitants), which is also one of the most expensive in the world.
The new mayor, the first citizen with South Asian family roots to claim the baton of New York, did so thanks to a brilliant campaign, supported by an unusual mastery of the language of social networks that he demonstrated again in the moment of triumph. It took 45 minutes for mainstream American media, including the Associated Press agency, to give him victory after polling stations closed at 9pm, and then his X account launched a simple 10-second video. In it you can see the inside of one of those unmistakable city subway cars and a sign for the City Hall station. A voice announces to travellers: “The next and last stop is the Town Hall”.
To these effective shots, which Mamdani, or his campaign, launch without apparent effort, there is also an old-fashioned charisma, reminiscent of those politicians in the movies, at ease in the short distance of the selfie, shaking hands and kissing children. With this mix, Mamdani managed to mobilize an army of around 100,000 volunteers, a movement born in a few months, which knocked on more than three million doors to ask for a vote for the candidate and repeat an argument with three points that stand out from the others: free buses, a freeze on rent controls until 2030 and free nursery for children under five.
Those simple ideas, which he repeated in a speech after announcing his victory in a Brooklyn theater and before an enthusiastically chanting crowd, won him a decisive and surprising victory in June’s Democratic primary. They also dominated this Tuesday in an election with a record participation of two million people – never seen since 1969 – in favor of voters and despite the objections of their opponents.
These, led by President Donald Trump, tried to pass him off as an unredeemed anti-Semite (for his defense of Palestine and his denunciation of the “genocide” in Gaza) and an apologist for Islamic terrorism. And, above all, they presented him as a dangerous communist, ready to bankrupt the city and bring it back to its worst nightmares, to the leaden years of unbridled crime decades ago.
It will be from January 1st, the day on which the new mayor will be sworn in, that it will be possible to verify whether these fears about Mamdani are well-founded or are just phantoms that the city’s established power has fomented – from big businessmen to rentiers, from Wall Street sharks to pro-Israeli activists and cultural mandarins – to stop a candidate who has proven to be unstoppable, especially, but not only, among young people.
“I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And I refuse to apologize for it,” he proclaimed in his speech, in which he directly challenged the president of the United States. “I know you’re watching me. I only have three words for you: turn up the (TV) volume!” “New York will continue to be a city of immigrants, built by immigrants and led by immigrants. And, starting tonight, led by an immigrant.”
Mamdani easily beat (50.4% of the votes) his rivals who, it must also be recognized, were not the best equipped opponents. The main one was the former Democratic governor of New York State Andrew Cuomo (41.6%), who had entrusted his political resurrection to these elections after his ignominious resignation in 2021 from a decade-long career, plagued by a sexual harassment scandal. Not even him, with his pedigree (he is the son of another governor, Mario Cuomo), his scent of times gone by and his closeness to the economic powers and power establishment of the Democratic Party – nor Curtis Sliwa (7.1%) – the Republican candidate who has never had real options in a traditionally progressive place – failed to beat Mamdani, despite the fact that Trump supported Cuomo on Monday. Or maybe it was for this reason.
Acquisition in January
Born in Kampala (Uganda) in 1991 and son of intellectuals – the Indian director Mira Nair and the Columbia academic Mahmoud Mamdani – the new mayor of New York also embodies the consecration of the alternative, more to the left compared to the Democratic Party, the Democratic Socialists of the United States (DSA). It is a rising formation against inequality, uncontrolled capitalism and the disappointment of Hillary Clinton’s defeat against Donald Trump in 2016. Furthermore, in the heat of the example of the presidential campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
It has already borne its first fruits on the national scene with the emergence in 2018 – the year in which, among other things, Mamdani obtained nationality – of the figure of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She, like the new mayor, is heir to a tradition that has its roots in the 1920s – with the socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs -, is inspired by the principles of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and has a direct antecedent in those who took to the streets of Manhattan after the 2008 crisis to occupy Wall Street.
For a Democratic Party mired in an existential crisis after the defeat of Kamala Harris in November 2024, Mamdani’s rise against all odds is a shock that forces its leadership to discuss the future, in which it will also have to tell the lesson of the night’s other sensational Democratic victories in the gubernatorial elections of Virginia and New Jersey, states in which two moderate candidates, Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill, triumphed: a Mamdani triumph that voters are eager for a replacement generational and more progressive policies? Or is it a mistake to conclude that what is said by a large city can be extrapolated to the rest of the country, where for decades prudence has invited candidates to go to the center to win over the undecided?
What the example of New York’s mayor-elect seems to confirm is that it is no longer possible, if it ever was, to win high-energy elections in the United States within the rigid confines of traditional parties. And that in the age of social networks, only those who manage different shades of populism, right or left, will have the opportunity to choose at the polls.
In this Mamdani is similar to Trump, with whom the socialist candidate was not afraid to confront himself: he often insists on the fact that what led him to run for mayor of New York – with a past as a rapper without much luck, whose stage name, Mr. Cardamom, was also a nod to his identity – was the same thing that brought the Republicans back to the White House a year ago: the certainty that the cost of living had become unbearable for Americans.
One of the big questions now in New York is how Trump plans to respond to Mamdani’s victory. First, the president was quick to distance himself from Republican defeats on his social network. Then he wrote a cryptic message that read: “Well, here we are.” The Republican has threatened to minimize the contribution of federal funds to the city, and no one can rule out that he will end up sending the National Guard to the streets of New York, as he has done in Los Angeles or Washington, among other cities.
Mamdani began and ended the day he became mayor by vowing to stand up to Trump. He did it in the morning, at the beginning of a splendid autumn day in New York in a public park in Queens, after voting with his wife, the illustrator Rama Duwaji, at a polling station in their neighborhood, Astoria.
This time he was without the narrow tie that has become an indispensable part of his uniform in recent months and which complements a black suit and a wide, stainless smile. Knowing his message management, that detail could only indicate one thing: After a grueling year-long campaign, Mamdani was ready to stop courting his neighbors and sit back and wait for them to give him the support he needed to make New York history. Well, before the end of the day, he ended up doing it.
