In a speech full of hope, Mamdani celebrates a new political order
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 10 hours ago
- 3 min read
By DANA RUBINSTEIN and CLAIRE FAHY
Shortly after Zohran Mamdani was anointed the mayor-elect of New York City, he strode onto the stage of a cavernous, ornate theater, put his hand on his heart, smiled his signature smile and nodded to a socialist forebear.
“As Eugene Debs once said, I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity,” Mamdani said.
The crowd roared its approval.
Mamdani’s speech to the faithful Tuesday night was as suffused with hope as his come-from-behind campaign, which captivated a city and a nation and offered a youthful rebuke to the aging standard-bearers of the Democratic Party and the politics that they have embraced.
In nearly every facet of Mamdani’s identity — his ethnicity, his religion, his democratic socialism, his age, Mamdani represents change. And in his first remarks since he was declared the winner of Tuesday’s election, Mamdani, 34, shied away from none of that.
“I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older,” Mamdani said, in one of several laugh lines of the night. “I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”
Mamdani’s nearly 25-minute speech to an ecstatic crowd at the Brooklyn Paramount theater was at turns defiant, arch and unabashedly hopeful.
He skewered Andrew Cuomo, the political scion he vanquished not just in the June Democratic primary for mayor, but again in Tuesday’s general election.
“My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty,” Mamdani said. “I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life. But let tonight be the final time I utter his name.”
He delivered an ode to immigrants and working-class New Yorkers, to people with “palms calloused from delivery-bike handlebars” and “knuckles scarred with kitchen burns,” to “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas; Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses; Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.”
He nodded to the youth of his base — “the next generation of New Yorkers who refuse to accept that the promise of a better future was a relic of the past,” and promised to deliver on an expansive, ambitious agenda that he likened to that of Fiorello LaGuardia, the beloved former mayor of New York City whose achievements were turbocharged by the New Deal.
Mamdani will not have a Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House, however. He will have Donald Trump, who in the days preceding the election, urged New Yorkers to choose Cuomo, derided Mamdani as a “liddle Communist” and threatened to defund New York City should it elect him.
New York City’s electorate defied Trump’s threats.
And on Tuesday, Mamdani took the opportunity to address Trump directly.
“Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you,” Mamdani said. “Turn the volume up.”
He went on to describe Trump as the avatar of things that plague New York City — the “bad landlords” and “the culture of corruption” — and he argued that the city that gave birth to Trump should rightly be the place that demonstrates to the world how to take him on.
“If anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him,” Mamdani said. “And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.”
As he delivered remarks in a speech sprinkled with Arabic, his supporters, many draped in the colors of his campaign, shrieked and shouted his promises back to him.
“Together, New York, we’re going to freeze the …”
“Rent!” the crowd responded.
“Together, New York, we’re going to make buses fast and …”
“Free!” the crowd intoned.
“Together, New York, we’re going to deliver universal …”
“Child care!” the crowd said.
And while he acknowledged that his goals were ambitious, Mamdani said he had every intention of achieving them.
“Our greatness will be anything but abstract,” he said.