Three years ago, at the annual New York City Marathon, one of the participants wore a t-shirt that said Eric Adams Raised My Rent! An allusion to the rent increases promoted by the still mayor of the city. Two marathons later, that is, last year, that same runner wore a t-shirt that said the same thing on the front but added the following on the back: Zohran Will Freeze It! That is to say: a certain Zohran Mamdani It will freeze prices and they will not rise any more.
That runner was none other than Mamdani himself campaigning for himself. The truth is that at that time no one paid much attention to him. Not even in 2022, when he had only been doing politics for a couple of years in the New York State Assemblynor last year, when his participation in the city marathon was one of his first public appearances after announcing his candidacy for mayor of the city.
It went completely unnoticed. And not only that; The thing is that anyone who took a look at his profile concluded that a guy like Mamdani had no history.
An openly pro-Palestinian Muslim born in Uganda three decades ago and professionally dedicated to producing hip hop music ruling the city? Unlikely. But then, last summer, to the surprise of many, he won the presidential primary. Democratic Party –his– to the mayor of New York and everything changed.
Barack Obama called the next day to congratulate him and Kathy Hochulgovernor of the state and a powerful figure in the Democratic Party, decided to put aside her skepticism and provide public support. “Walking through New York with Mamdani this summer meant witnessing the birth of a political star,” he wrote a few days ago. Eric Lachthe magazine’s New York correspondent The New Yorker (pardon the redundancy).
Immigrant origins
Thirty-three years before that political star was born, what was born was a child like any other in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, within a family belonging to the Indian diaspora settled in Africa between the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th.
It was at the age of seven that Mamdani’s parents decided to relocate to New York. There little Zohran attended the Bronx High School of Science and later graduated in African Studies in Bowdoin Collegea small private college in Maine where he co-founded the local chapter of the organization Students for Justice in Palestine.
Mamdani, who already pointed out progressive ways and for a time collaborated in a movement that tried to prevent housing evictions, ended up embracing socialism during the 2016 presidential elections – which gave the first victory to Donald Trump– inspired by leftist Bernie Sanderssurveilled main rival of Hillary Clinton in those Democratic Party primaries.
Today Mamdani, a figure who tries to combine his immigrant roots, his Muslim faith and socialist postulates, has the support of a father who teaches at the Columbia Universityfrom a mother who is also a renowned film director, and his wife: a young 27-year-old Syrian artist, living in Brooklyn, called Rama Duwaji and whom he met on a dating portal called Hinge.
Groundbreaking program, expected influences
Beyond projecting an identity aligned with a city that is no longer multicultural but full of people who were not born in it, the support it has garnered to date cannot be understood without looking at what it has spent months promising to do in the event of victory.
Always putting forward the label of “the people’s candidate,” Mamdani has said that he will implement a free bus service throughout the city, that he will freeze rents (in addition to punishing “negligent” landlords) and that he will set up a supermarket chain with food at very low prices.
Among his proposals is also the implementation of a universal daycare system (for children between six weeks and five years old), tripling the construction of housing for low-income people and radically reforming the structure of the mayor’s office so that his team can work on all of the above without having to deal with obstacles.
When asked how it will be possible to carry out – ergo afford – such initiatives, the answer lies in an increase in taxes on large fortunes and corporations. A measure with which it hopes to be able to raise about 9,000 million dollars.
Your references? Varied but logical. From intellectuals of Palestinian origin and anti-colonialism such as Edward Said o Rashid Khalidi until Nelson Mandela o Franklin Delano Roosevelt –the American president who fought the Great Depression by promoting that famous social program called New Deal– passing through Toni Morrisonthe famous African American novelist, or the classical philosopher Aristotle.
An inexperienced “communist”?
Although he handles the times and tools of the so-called “new politics” very well, which is why his message has gone very far very quickly, Mamdani is no stranger to criticism. Logically.
One of the most common, constantly launched by the former governor of the state and now rival Andrew Cuomoit has to do with his lack of experience. “Experience, competence, knowing how to do the job, knowing how to deal with Trump, knowing how to deal with Washington, knowing how to deal with the state legislature – these are basics,” he declared, referring to what no Mamdani has to his credit. “I believe in practical training, but not while one is mayor of New York.”
Other criticisms start from ideology – or identity – and tend to be much more visceral. The Trumpist right, for example, considers Mamdani to be a “communist.” And part of the city’s Jewish population considers him “extremist” and even “anti-Semitic” due to sympathies for Gaza that, they say, do not bode well. At this point it is worth highlighting, however, that Mamdani has thousands of supporters among the Jewish youth of New York due, above all, to his economic proposals.
What’s more: one of their support groups is called “Jews for Zohran.” In other words: “Jews for Zohran.”
And then there is the centrist wing of the Democratic Party. Today it continues to be the majority and, of course, it views the young socialist with very little sympathy. Not so much for what it defends, say experts in American politics, as for what it represents: the rise of militant leftism within a formation that until now has not wanted to move one bit away from the establishment.