‘I’ve not felt like this since Obama’: crowds hail mayor Zohran Mamdani

Zohran Mamdani promised a new era of government in America’s largest city on Thursday as he was sworn in as New York mayor in a jubilant ceremony outside City Hall.

Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist whose upset victory made him a political star, is the first Muslim to hold the office and the youngest mayor of New York in more than a century.

“A moment like this comes rarely,” he told a crowd that filled the park at the steps of the hall and a stretch of Broadway, where a block party was under way in frigid temperatures. “Seldom do we have so much opportunity to transform and reinvent.”

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In a speech recalling the most left-wing leaders among his predecessors — Bill de Blasio, David Dinkins and the man still considered the greatest of New York’s mayors, Fiorello La Guardia — Mamdani declared: “Here, where the language of the New Deal was born, we will return the vast resources of this city to the workers.”

He also paid tribute to his immediate predecessor, Eric Adams, who sat bundled up on the stage behind him, calling him “a son of Brownsville who rose from washing dishes to the highest position in our city”.

He added: “He and I have had our share of disagreements, but I will always be touched that he chose me as the mayoral candidate that he would most want to be trapped with on an elevator.”

Mamdani campaigned on a promise to make an expensive city affordable again for its working class, pledging a freeze in the rent, universal free childcare, free buses and a tax on the wealthiest New Yorkers.

Many political observers doubt that a relative novice, who had previously served as a little-known state assemblyman for Queens, can fulfil such an ambitious agenda.

The Vermont senator Bernie Sanders administered Mamdani’s oath of office ANDRES KUDACKI/AP

Addressing the crowd assembled in City Hall park and others listening in barbershops, delis and taxis, he insisted they should not lower their expectations but raise them. “The only expectation I will seek to reset is that of small expectations,” he said.

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Other speakers noted he had already achieved the impossible by making it to City Hall. The poet Cornelius Eady, who recited one of his works at the ceremony, recalled a prediction that hell would freeze over before the young socialist became leader of the central hub of global capitalism. “Well,” he said with a smile. “Here we are.”

Mamdani was sworn in by his hero Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator for Vermont who was also considered a political outlier before he nearly captured the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.

“I’m here mostly to thank the people of New York City,” Sanders said. “At a time in our country’s history when we are seeing too much hatred, too much division and too much injustice, thank you for electing Zohran Mamdani as your mayor.”

The left-wing congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spelled out the momentous nature of the occasion. “Zohran Mamdani will be the first Muslim mayor of our great city,” she said of the former assemblyman, who was born in Uganda and became a US citizen in 2018. “He will be our first immigrant mayor in over a century and he will be the youngest mayor of New York City in generations.”

This prompted a cheer from the young crowd shivering in their seats. “We have chosen courage over fear,” she said. “We have chosen prosperity for the majority over spoils for the few.”

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Khalid Latif, an imam, stood before a group of five leaders of assorted faiths and offered a prayer to a city where “a young immigrant socialist Muslim can be brave enough to run for mayor and bold enough to win”.

Letitia James, the New York attorney-general, with the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez JEENAH MOON/REUTERS

The actor Mandy Patinkin, a prominent Mamdani fan, stepped out of City Hall with a school choir from Staten Island and sang Somewhere Over The Rainbow, turning, as his voice soared, to grasp the mayor by the hand.

The day had dawned bright and clear, with a dusting of snow. A queue of Mamdani supporters, some in the yellow hats of his mayoral campaign, others in the red hats of the Democratic Socialists of America, wound around the edge of City Hall park. Another formed at the barricades along a stretch of Broadway where a block party was staged with Jumbotron screens.

“I don’t think I even thought that this would ever be a thing I would witness,” said Jack Peterson, a 25-year-old teacher who began volunteering for Mamdani’s campaign last summer. “It’s the end of a lot of working and organising.”

Mandy Patinkin, who starred in Homeland DAVID DEE DELGADO/GETTY IMAGES

The comedian and podcaster Adam Friedland, waiting to pass through security, pronounced himself hopeful. “It’s a feeling I have not had, with this type of campaign, since Obama,” he said. “I think that it’s exciting. He’s a great guy.” He added that Mamdani was “a Gooner”, referring to his professed support of Arsenal football club.

A year ago Mamdani was all but anonymous as a political figure, his career mysterious even to the fellow members of his local New York City football team. (One of them, looking him up, discovered to his immense surprise that their fullback was also an elected politician.)

Shortly after he began his run for mayor, he competed in the New York marathon in a T-shirt that on the front said “Eric Adams Raised My Rent!”, in reference to his predecessor as mayor, and “Zohran Will Freeze It!” on the back, blending effortlessly into the jogging multitude.

Last February, when he married Rama Duwaji at the city clerk’s office, they did not have to worry about paparazzi. In that office stands a wall-sized photograph of City Hall. Mamdani knelt before his bride in front of it, grinning at the joke: he was running to be mayor, but this might be the closest he would get to it.

Now he stood on the steps of City Hall, a liberal superstar and one of the most famous political figures in America.

His speech doubled as a love letter to the city, where “a Muslim kid like me grew up eating bagels and lox every Sunday”. Referencing the Frank Sinatra anthem, he added: “We will do something that New Yorkers do better than anyone else: We will set an example for the world. If what Sinatra said is true, let us prove that anyone can make it in New York.”