The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has congratulated Zohran Mamdani on his election victory and what he called a “historic campaign.”
“New Yorkers faced a clear choice — between hope and fear,” Mr. Khan wrote in a statement on social media, “and just like we’ve seen in London — hope won.”
The result of Tuesday’s New York City mayoral election means the largest cities in both Britain and the United States will be led by liberal, Muslim sons of immigrants, both of whom have risen to power in part by resisting a rightward lurch in their countries. Mr. Khan spoke briefly to Mr. Mamdani in a phone call earlier this year, according to senior advisers for both leaders, to congratulate him on his victory in the Democratic mayoral primary.
But there are also differences in their political stances: Mr. Khan, who was a lawmaker for Britain’s governing Labour Party before he ran for mayor in 2016, has governed as an establishment centrist, while Mr. Mamdani proudly champions the progressive left’s agenda.
Both men have been the subject of vitriol focused on their religion, backgrounds and politics. And both have been targets of President Trump, who has called Mr. Mamdani a “pure communist” and Mr. Khan a “stone-cold loser.”
Both men’s campaigns faced a surge of Islamophobia in their final days. Over the past week, a slew of social media posts used images of 9/11 while urging New Yorkers to vote against Mr. Mamdani. In 2016, days before Mr. Khan’s election, an article penned by his Conservative opponent was illustrated with a photograph of a bus bombed during London’s deadliest terrorist attacks, and suggested that Mr. Khan considered terrorists “friends.”
Mr. Khan, who rejected his opponent’s claims, won the final vote by 13 percentage points to become the first Muslim mayor of London. He has since secured two further terms.
In his victory speech on Tuesday night, Mr. Mamdani pledged to combat bigotry in all its forms.
He said that he would fight against “the scourge of antisemitism” and as well as show that New York is a city where Muslims “know that they belong,” adding: “No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.”
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