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, there is no doubt that he has New York’s attention. On Thursday, up to 40,000 people were 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, Israel, as in Manhattan.
READ MORE
On Thursday, after a two-month transition sprint, it officially made 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 one million New Yorkers voted against him, and rarely has a mayor taken office promising to deliver so much with so few assurances of needed co-operation.
Mamdani, a soon-to-be former assembly member 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 childcare 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 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 long-time ally of and former state official under former governor Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani’s chief election rival.
The opposition will be real. Small landlords are worried that Mamdani’s proposed rent freeze on rent-stabilised units could bankrupt them. Political moderates see a city hurtling toward the extremes. Many Jewish New Yorkers (though certainly not all) view Mamdani’s stark critiques of Israel as a threat to their safety.
Gerard Kassar, who leads New York’s Conservative Party, said he feared that Mamdani would make his hometown “an American test tube for tried and failed international socialist policies”.
National standard-bearers of the left, including senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have noted the stakes and become regulars in Mamdani’s transition offices in recent weeks. (Sanders was due to administer the oath of office at Mamdani’s inauguration.)
“If Mayor Mamdani can build childcare and more affordable housing and cheaper groceries there, then we can do it anywhere else in the country,” Warren said in a recent interview.
But after the raw enmity of the campaign, there has also been a notable thaw.
Many of the wealthy business executives who wrote large cheques to try to stop his election breathed a sigh of relief when Mamdani said he would reappoint Jessica Tisch, the respected police commissioner, and hire other government veterans as top deputies.
“If you are engaged in civic life, and you care about the city, it’s hard to do anything but root for a new mayor,” said Cohen, who ran a $30 million (€25.5 million) super political action committee that attacked Mamdani as naive, an enemy of the police and “radical”.
In an interview, he said Mamdani had diagnosed real problems around the cost of living in the city. “There’s a hope that new blood, a new perspective and a heightened kind of energy will make a difference,” Cohen said.
Mamdani has also laboured – with mixed success – to reassure Jewish New Yorkers that he wants to be their mayor, too. He recently met a group of rabbis and joined actor Mandy Patinkin, and his wife, actress Kathryn Grody, at their apartment to make latkes for Hanukkah.
Perhaps most surprising, though, was Mamdani’s Oval Office meeting last month with US president Donald Trump. After the president had spent months threatening to withhold billions of dollars in federal funds and send in the National Guard if Mamdani was elected, he appeared almost charmed.
“I expect to be helping him, not hurting him – a big help,” Trump said, as Mamdani stood next to him somewhat stiffly.
Many allies of the president and of Mamdani, who has called Trump a “fascist”, doubt the peace will last.
For now, though, many of Mamdani’s most ardent supporters, and even average Democrats, appear to be willing to be hopeful.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
2025 The New York Times Company
