Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York, during his swearing-in ceremony. Photo / Getty Images
Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, has been sworn in publicly as the mayor of New York City outside City Hall in Manhattan, ushering in a generational shift for the city’s leadership.
“Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously. We may not always succeed, but never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try,” Mamdani said after he was sworn in. “To those who insist that the era of big government is over, hear me when I say this: No longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers’ lives.”
Hours earlier, Mamdani was officially sworn in in an intimate ceremony in the Old City Hall subway station that took place at midnight.
He is the first Muslim mayor and the youngest in generations to run the United States’ largest and wealthiest city.
Over the course of his campaign last year, he rose from a little-known New York State Assembly member to a nationally recognised political force, defeating former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s famed Democratic political dynasty.
Mamdani’s social-media-fuelled campaign tightly focused on affordability, running on a platform that promised to freeze the rent on the city’s nearly 1 million rent-stabilised apartments, make buses fast and free, and deliver universal childcare. He plans to fund these ideas by raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy, including the city’s billionaires who spent big last year to defeat him.
Mamdani was joined at his public swearing-in by two high-profile political allies, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, highlighting the democratic socialist wing of the Democratic Party at a time when beleaguered party leaders are clawing back from 2024’s decisive loss to President Donald Trump.
“Zohran’s opponents have called the agenda that he campaigned on radical, communistic - oh, and absolutely unachievable. Really? That’s not what we believe. In the richest country in the history of the world, making sure that people can live in affordable housing is not radical,” Sanders said before swearing Mamdani in.
The few thousand people attending the ceremony started chanting “tax the rich” after Sanders suggested that wealthy and large corporations should be taxed.
The three politicians have energised huge crowds at their respective events. But their positions on key issues fall to the left of many of their Democratic colleagues, some of whom worry about alienating centrist Democratic voters.
Both the private swearing-in ceremony, held in a subway station to highlight the working-class emphasis that Mamdani plans to bring to his mayoralty, and the larger, public block party, were thick with the kind of symbolism that Mamdani displayed throughout his campaign.
At the public ceremony, fifth-graders from the PS22 Chorus of Staten Island sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow. The Sikh artist Babbulicious performed a song in Punjabi and English after Mamdani finished his speech and the crowd erupted in cheers. And popular Grammy-winning singer Lucy Dacus performed Bread and Roses, a song associated with trade unions and the women’s labour movement.
“A moment like this comes rarely. Seldom do we hold such an opportunity to transform and reinvent. Rarer still is it the people themselves whose hands are the ones upon the levers of change,” Mamdani said.
But Mamdani faces formidable challenges. To achieve many of his promises, he must maintain the support of New York Governor Kathy Hochul and the state’s legislature, whose approval would be required to fund Mamdani’s plans for free buses and child care.
Born in Uganda, Mamdani moved to New York at age 7 with his father, Mahmood Mamdani, a professor at Columbia University, and his mother, Mira Nair, a film-maker known for films including The Namesake and Mississippi Masala. He attended New York public schools and graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in Africana studies. He became a US citizen in 2018.
Mamdani has said he was inspired to go into politics after working as a foreclosure prevention housing counsellor in Queens, helping low-income homeowners of colour fight eviction orders. He was elected in 2020 to a State Assembly seat, representing neighbourhoods in Queens – the city’s most diverse borough – such as Astoria, Ditmars Steinway and Astoria Heights.
Republican politicians, led by Trump, have sought to paint Mamdani as a radical communist and the face of a Democratic Party out of touch with mainstream voters. But Mamdani’s friendly visit to the Oval Office after being elected last year undercut some of those attacks and displayed the political skills that have propelled him to prominence.
In New York, ceremony attendees said they were enthusiastic about the moment.
Brandon West, a 40-year-old labour organiser from Brooklyn, said he was particularly hopeful about Mamdani’s plan to create a department of “community safety”, which would invest in citywide mental health programmes and deploy dedicated outreach workers in subway stations.
“We kind of forgot about the [George Floyd] movement and the way to talk about how to keep communities safe,” he said. “And this is a really big opportunity to actually be able to act on those policies.”
Dorothy LeConte, a 68-year-old who has driven a taxi around New York for decades, said that “it is time for us now to have a mayor who understands working people”.
She said she stood outside City Hall in 2021 when Mamdani joined the New York Taxi Workers Alliance hunger strike, which ended in victory for thousands of drivers when a deal was reached. LeConte said that moment sold her, and she was excited to support his campaign. She said she is convinced that Mamdani will not fall under the influence of the city’s wealthy, but she worries his opponents will “tie his hands” and prevent him from making good on his campaign promises.
“I believe that he’s not going to sell his soul,” Lecant said. “But in terms of getting things done, the risk could be against him.”
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