Live: Trump and Mamdani take questions from reporters after ‘great meeting’ at White House
Mamdani’s swift risepublished at 19:18 GMT
Anthony Zurcher
North America correspondent
Image source, EPA
Zohran Mamdani, the newly elected mayor of New York City, is notable in many ways. He will become city’s youngest mayor since 1892, its first Muslim mayor and its first mayor born in Africa.
That alone makes his victory over former Governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa remarkable. But more than that, he represents the kind of politician that many in the party’s left has been seeking for years.
He’s young and charismatic, with his generation’s natural comfort with social media. His ethnicity reflects the diversity of the Democratic Party’s base.
He hasn’t shied away from a political fight and has proudly espoused left-wing causes – such as free childcare, expanded public transportation and government intervention in free market systems.
He has shown a laser-like ability to focus on the kind of core economic issues that have been a priority for working-class voters who have drifted from the Democratic Party recently but he hasn’t disavowed the left’s cultural principles.
By running against and defeating Cuomo – a former New York governor who was himself the son of a governor – he vanquished the entrenched Democratic establishment viewed by many on the left as woefully out of touch with their party and their nation.
But critics have warned that such a candidate is unelectable in broad swathes of America – and Republicans have gleefully held the self-avowed democratic socialist up as the far-left face of the Democratic Party.
