Zohran Mamdani claimed a mandate late Tuesday after his stunning victory in New York City’s mayoral election.
He’s seeing red.
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani delivered a fire-breathing victory speech late Tuesday, sticking to his socialist guns and boldly promising to deliver on his sweeping agenda.
The Uganda-born Mamdani, 34, claimed his historic victory on behalf of all immigrant New Yorkers, and called out Islamophobic attacks on his campaign.
“As Eugene Debs once said, I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity,” he said from Brooklyn’s Paramount Theatre, launching into a 20-minute barn-burner of a speech by quoting the socialist presidential candidate.
Mamdani — who will be the first socialist, first Muslim and first New York City mayor of South Asian descent — said the moment reminded him of the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, the anticolonialist first prime minister of independent India.
“A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance,” he intoned.
Mamdani, the Upper West Side-raised son of an academic and a movie director, also expressed gratitude to the downtrodden New Yorkers who buoyed his political earthquake of a campaign.
“Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns – these are not hands that have been allowed to hold power,” he said.
