“It’s an awkward moment to be an American billionaire,” says The Times. Zohran Mamdani, who has just won the Democratic candidacy to become the next mayor of New York City, is calling for their extinction. “I don’t think we should have billionaires,” he told NBC News. Even the merely wealthy are in his crosshairs. Mamdani, 33, plans to partly fund a radical raft of pledges – including a rent freeze and a scheme for government-run grocery stores – by raising income taxes on New York’s millionaires by two percentage points.
As a progressive Muslim immigrant, the young firebrand bills himself as “Donald Trump’s worst nightmare”. Yet, just a few months ago, few people outside the district of Queens he represents had even heard of Mamdani, says The Economist. His unexpected victory over former state governor Andrew Cuomo has “delighted” fellow travellers, but “scared the living daylights out of many well-heeled New Yorkers”. Although unabashedly left-wing (he belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America, an activist group that believes “working people” should run things), the former rapper’s most effective calling card is his likeability. His success isn’t “primarily about his ideology. It’s about his talent as a new media-savvy politician,” says Jesse Arm of the Manhattan Institute think tank. Some compare Mamdani’s approachability to that of Ed Koch, a charismatic mayor in the 1970s and 1980s. “New Yorkers deserve a mayor who they can see, they can hear, they can even yell at,” he says.
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Born in Kampala, into an intellectual Ugandan Asian family, Mamdani arrived in New York at the age of seven, grew up in an artistic, radical circle, and became an American citizen only in 2018. He credits his parents for providing him with a “privileged upbringing” – he was educated privately at the Bank Street School for Children in Manhattan (a redoubt of New York’s progressive elite) before attending the Bronx High School of Science and later Bowdoin College in Maine, graduating in 2014 with a degree in Africana Studies. Before he entered politics in 2020 – when he was elected to the New York State assembly – Mamdani “dipped his toe into hip-hop”, under the name of “Mr Cardamom”, says The Economist. He was not successful. He then put in a stint as “a foreclosure-prevention counsellor” in Queens. He recently married artist Rana Duwaji, whom he met on dating app Hinge.
Can Zohran Mamdani become New York's mayor?
Even those fully supportive of Mamdani’s politics might baulk at his lack of experience. But if he beats his Republican rival – Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels – in November, he will become the first Muslim mayor in New York City’s history, as well as the youngest and the first immigrant in decades. “More importantly, he will be the first political star of the left to emerge during Trump’s second presidency.” Mamdani is “the sort of refreshing politician that Democrats have been looking for as an answer to the Visigothic vim of the Maga movement”. But Republicans may be just as delighted by his victory as progressives are. Mamdani is “a 100% communist lunatic”, says Trump. Let’s see if New Yorkers agree.
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