Zohran Kwame Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist wunderkind who rose from political obscurity and charmed skeptics from the boardroom to the White House, was publicly sworn in as New York City’s mayor on Thursday.
In his first speech as mayor, before a shivering crowd of thousands outside City Hall, Mr. Mamdani sought to immediately assure New Yorkers that he intended to carry out his affordability agenda, and that he would refuse to “reset expectations” for what government can and should deliver for the working class and the unprotected.
“The only expectation I seek to reset is that of small expectations,” Mr. Mamdani said. “Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously.”
He promised to lead unapologetically both as a democratic socialist — “I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic socialist,” he said — and as a mayor for all New Yorkers, including those who did not support him.
To those “who view this administration with distrust or disdain,” Mr. Mamdani said, “I promise you this. If you are a New Yorker, I am your mayor. Regardless of whether we agree, I will protect you, celebrate with you, mourn alongside you and never, not for a second, hide from you.”
The frigid, star-studded ceremony at City Hall featured two avatars of the progressive wing of American politics who had helped propel Mr. Mamdani to the mayoralty: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a fellow Democrat representing parts of Queens and the Bronx, delivered opening remarks, and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont administered the oath of office, with Mr. Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, resting his hand on two Qurans held by his wife, Rama Duwaji.
The message from the stage was unmistakable: In New York City, the left is ascendant. And to national Democratic leaders struggling to regain the party’s footing, Mr. Mamdani’s victory and the excitement surrounding it suggested a path forward.
“New York, thank you for inspiring our nation,” Mr. Sanders said. “Thank you for giving us, from coast to coast, the hope and the vision that we can create government that works for all, not just the wealthy and the few.”
The event took place in freezing temperatures before thousands of well-wishers who flooded the plaza in front of City Hall and poured into a section of Broadway more typically closed off for parades down the Canyon of Heroes, but this time for the inauguration of a self-described champion of the underrepresented. Amid the sea of knit caps there were union emblems, Democratic Socialists of America apparel and the occasional kaffiyeh. Attendees stuffed hand warmers into gloves and shifted from foot to foot to warm their toes.
The midday event followed a significantly more modest and subdued swearing-in ceremony just after midnight, during which Mr. Mamdani legally became mayor of New York City.
The subsequent public ceremony and adjoining block party captured a wave of New Yorkers hungry for a more earnest-seeming, more hopeful alternative to 21st-century American politics, and eager to turn the page on the cronyism and self-regarding swagger of the Eric Adams mayoralty. In Mr. Mamdani, they found a source of hope at a time when some perceive the Democratic Party as being in disarray and despair.
The festive atmosphere captured the generational, political, ethnic and religious magnitude of Mr. Mamdani’s ascent.
He is New York City’s first millennial mayor, its first South Asian mayor and its first mayoral soccer fanatic. He is the city’s youngest mayor in a century, and he is the first to be so wholly identified with the Democratic Socialists of America, whose local chapter fledged his political career.
Mr. Mamdani is also arguably the most charismatic New York City mayor of the 21st century. His personal magnetism, warm, engaging smile and seeming ability to engage politely with divergent positions, has won over interlocutors in mosques and soup kitchens, in the Oval Office and on Wall Street. He has demonstrated an unusual ability to communicate his ideas to the masses in plain English (and Urdu and Bengali and Spanish) on social media, in videos that often go viral.
But Mr. Mamdani is also one of the least proven city managers in New York’s history, with just five years of legislative experience under his belt, and a résumé that includes stints as a foreclosure prevention counselor and a high school English tutor. He has also managed a failed State Senate campaign, had a brief rap career as Mr. Cardamom and worked as a music supervisor on “Queen of Katwe,” a film by his mother, Mira Nair.
Now, he will be responsible for 300,000 workers comprising a government serving 8.5 million, where nearly every single major city department, from police and fire to environmental protection, qualifies as the nation’s largest. Mr. Mamdani’s ambitious agenda of fast and free buses and universal day care makes even that already impossible-seeming task that much more daunting.
He will have to underwrite those programs’ estimated $7 billion-a-year price tag while managing deep cuts to federal funding, an erratic and often vengeful president and a more moderate governor facing her own re-election this year. Accomplishing his goals is likely to require trade-offs that he has thus far shown little willingness to acknowledge.
Can he achieve universal day care while also elevating wages for those in the industry? Can he build 200,000 affordably priced apartments while mandating the workers who build them earn unionized wages? Can he manage the nation’s largest paramilitary force in a teeming metropolis that is often more moderate than its national reputation suggests, while also retaining a far-left base that often evinces disdain for the police?
The Ugandan-born only child of an Oscar-nominated movie director and a scholar of colonialism, Mr. Mamdani has vowed to become the first mayor to avoiding visiting Israel since 1951. Can he tend to his anti-Israel base while retaining relations with New York’s diverse Jewish community, many of whom continue to regard him with ample skepticism?
He has overcome obstacles before. Just weeks before the Democratic primary, Mr. Mamdani was a distant second in the polls to former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who was trying to resurrect his career after he resigned amid a raft of sexual harassment allegations.
Unpersuaded by his defeat in the primary, Mr. Cuomo ran in the general election on an independent ballot line. Mr. Mamdani triumphed again, winning just over 50 percent of the vote, with Mr. Cuomo garnering support from New Yorkers turned off by Mr. Mamdani’s inexperience and his anti-Zionist and socialist views.
“Some people feel like he doesn’t have any experience, but I think he can do the job,” said Stephen Minter, a retired telecommunications worker and resident of the Bronx, on Wednesday. “I think we’ve gotten in trouble with people who have all kinds of experience.”
Mr. Mamdani has shown an early ability to practice realpolitik. So severe is his message discipline, that reporters have recently found it difficult to derive news from his carefully worded responses at press conferences.
He has held several private meetings with rabbis and Jewish leaders, and recorded a video with the actor Mandy Patinkin and his wife, the actress Kathryn Grody, at their apartment to make latkes for Hanukkah. (Mr. Patinkin performed “Over the Rainbow” at the inauguration, accompanied by a grade-school chorus from Staten Island.)
Mr. Mamdani opted to retain Jessica Tisch, the billionaire heiress who served as Mayor Adams’s sanitation commissioner, as the city’s police commissioner, a concession to the business leaders and permanent government types who both esteem her and worry about Mr. Mamdani’s former hostility to the police and his ability to actually tamp down on crime.
To the concern of some leftists, his senior appointments have veered toward permanent government types, not tear-it-all-down socialists. He helped quash the congressional bid of an ideological ally in an effort to retain a working relationship with the possible next speaker of the U.S. House. And he backed a staunch, non-D.S.A. ally in a Manhattan congressional seat at the expense of a potential D.S.A. candidate.
Mr. Mamdani will at least have the benefit of time, assuming he is not ejected from office after one term like his predecessor, Mr. Adams. Unlike many of the city’s former mayors, Mr. Mamdani’s attention is less likely to wander to national political ambitions. His status as an immigrant-born, naturalized citizen renders him unable to run for president.
He may also benefit from the roughly 100,000 volunteers who helped power his insurgent campaign.
Running a winning campaign was extremely difficult, Mr. Sanders said. But running a city of 8.5 million people will be “even harder”
“Zohran needed your help to win the election,” Mr. Sanders said. “Now he will need your help to govern.”
Members of the crowd roared their approval.
Sarah Chatta and Andy Newman contributed reporting.
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
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