In a few short months, Zohran Mamdani has gone from a relative unknown to the mayor-elect of New York. While the 34-year-old Mamdani has been a state assemblyman since 2021, his rise to prominence in the United States, if not around the globe, has been nothing less than meteoric.
Mr Mamdani, a democratic socialist, won the election on Nov 4 and will be the first Muslim and South Asian mayor of New York.
The son of an Ugandan academic and an Indian-American filmmaker, Mr Mamdani was born in Uganda. The family lived in South Africa for a few years before moving to the US when he was seven, where he has lived ever since. Earlier this year, he married the illustrator Rama Sawaf Duwaji, 27, who was born in the US to Syrian Muslim parents. Aside from English, he speaks Arabic, Spanish, Bengali, and Hindi–Urdu and is a dual citizen of the US and Uganda.
“Tonight we have spoken in a clear voice. Hope is alive. Hope is a decision that tens of thousands of New Yorkers made day after day, volunteer shift after volunteer shift, despite attack ad after attack ad. More than a million of us stood in our churches, in gymnasiums, in community centres, as we filled in the ledger of democracy,” he said in a speech after it was evident that he had won the election.
He also quoted Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, saying, “A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”
The mayor-elect also had words for US President Donald Trump, a critic of Mr Mamdani and who had not only endorsed his rival, Andrew Cuomo, but also threatened that he would cut funding to New York in the event of a Mamdani win.
“If anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him, and if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.
“This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one. So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up.”
Mr Mamdani promised to “stand alongside unions and expand labour protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed.
“New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant.” /TISG
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