2 hours ago
1
Zohran Mamdani on Thursday vowed to “reinvent” New York City in a speech on his first day as mayor, promising “a new era” for America’s largest city and an ambitious start to his term of office.
The 34-year-old political star and democratic socialist, who a year ago was a virtually unknown state assemblyman, is the city’s first Muslim mayor, first of south Asian descent and the first to be born in Africa. He is also the first to be sworn in using the Qur’an.
Mamdani added that a “moment like this comes rarely and rarer still is it that the people themselves whose hands are upon the levers of change”.
The mayor said that in writing his remarks, he was advised to lower expectations. “I will do no such thing,” he said. “The only expectation I seek to reset is that of small expectations. 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 did not shy away from his socialist politics. “I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic socialist. I will not abandon my principles for fear of being called radical,” he said to loud cheers from the gathered crowd.
He ended by saying: “The work has only just begun.”
The speech was the second of a two-part ceremony after he was sworn in at midnight on Thursday in a disused subway station where he was flanked by the New York attorney general, Letitia James, and his wife, Rama Duwaji, a 28 year-old tanimator and illustrator.
On the steps of city hall on a bitterly cold January day, the newly elected mayor was introduced by the Bronx Democrat congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist ally who is edging toward a run for the White House in 2028.
“We have chosen courage over fear. We have chosen prosperity for the many over spoils for the few,” Ocasio-Cortez said in her remarks. “We have chosen to make a new future for all of us, we have chosen a mayor who is relentlessly dedicated to make life not just possible but aspirational for working people ... we have chosen that over the distractions of bigotry and the barbarism of extreme inequality.”
Mamdani was then formally sworn in by the Vermont independent senator Bernie Sanders, another political ally who in many ways laid the groundwork for Mamdani’s affordability agenda with his run for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2016.
That effort, widely seen to have been undone by allies of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton within the party’s national political organization, has now borne fruit and with it the underlying political message of affordability, code for economic rights.
Sanders said in his address to the crowd that Mamdani was taking power “at a time when we are seeing too much hatred, too much divisive and too much injustice” and called for “government that works for all, not just the wealthy and the few”.
He added that Mamdani had taken on the Democrat and Republican establishments, “the president of the United States and some enormously wealthy oligarchs and you defeated them in the biggest political upset in modern American history”.
Mamdani now begins one of the most unrelenting jobs in American politics as one of the country’s closest-watched politicians whose platform promises free childcare, free buses, a rent freeze for about 1m households, and a pilot of city-run grocery stores.
But the estimated $10bn cost of providing those services may be hard to find. Mamdani has vowed to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and increase corporate taxes. But as a vassal city of the state government in Albany, he will need the legislative support of Governor Kathy Hochul, who running for re-election next year.
He’ll also have to deal with Donald Trump, who has labelled the new mayor a “communist” and threatened to withhold federal funding from the city. But a friendly meeting between the outer borough New Yorkers last month, where they bonded over building more housing in the city, surprised many expecting a political firework show.
“I want him to do a great job and will help him do a great job,” Trump said.
Mamdani also faces skepticism from some Jewish New Yorkers alarmed by his criticisms of Israel’s government and failure to emphatically distance himself from the phrase “from the river to the sea”, though Mamdani has said he will no longer use it.
The extent of those sensitivities became apparent during Mamdani’s transition when his director of appointments, Cat da Costa, stepped down after tweets came to light in which she had described Jewish people as “money hungry” and called a train in Far Rockaway the “Jew train”.
Mamdani’s transition team called the error “an unacceptable oversight in the vetting process does not meet the Mayor-elect’s standards for this transition or the incoming administration”.
But Mamdani has also sought to smooth over the tensions by persuading the city’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, to remain in her position, avoiding the appearance of losing Jewish police chief as well a measure of continuity to tense issue of policing in the city.
New York mayors are typically judged on their ability to provide basic services – trash collection, curbing the city’s infestation of rats, fixing potholes and getting the subways to run smoothly.
Before ending his term as mayor on Wednesday, Eric Adams touted his administration’s anti-crime efforts, which he credited for historically low numbers of homicides and shootings. There were 301 homicides in the city in 2025, 79 less than in 2024.
Adams said the New York police department had taken 25,000 illegal guns off city streets over the past four years and drive-by shootings had declined by 55%.
Mamdani and Duwaji will now give up their one-bedroom, rent-stabilized apartment in Astoria, Queens, to take up residence in the stately mayoral residence of Gracie Mansion, built in 1799, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Last month, Adams warned Mamdani that the mansion is haunted. “It’s a friendly ghost, as long as you’re doing right by the city,” he said. “If you don’t become right by the city, he turns into a poltergeist.”
