New York New York goes up in flames

Unlike Europe, especially Southern Europe, where electoral promises “only bind those who believe them” (François Mitterrand) or where failure to fulfill them is not taken into account or punished much in subsequent elections, in the United States, an unfulfilled promise is equivalent to a conscious lie, a very disqualifying stain, which is paid for electorally in one way or another.

The most powerful country on Earth is by no means uniform, but its immense conglomerate of people ends up, with the exceptions that prove the rule, integrating into the values that have made it great.

New York, the financial capital of the United States and the world, is as diverse as the country to which it belongs and so distinct in its habits and platforms for personal and collective promotion that it is both an attractive and unique city.

Starting next January, it will be led by a mayor who embodies both the diversity and ambition of the Big Apple, Zohran Kwame Mandani, a Ugandan by birth, the son of Indian parents: Mahmud Mandani, a researcher and professor of postcolonial studies who professes the Shia Muslim religion, and Mira Nair, a film director and screenwriter with films such as Monsoon Wedding, Salaam Bombay, Kama Sutra, and Queen of Katwe to her credit.

When Zohran turned seven, the Mamdani family emigrated from Kampala (Uganda) to Cape Town (South Africa), from where they would emigrate again two years later, but to the United States, and more specifically to New York.

His father's influence led Zohran Mamdani down the path of specialized studies in Africa, from which he eventually graduated from the University of Brunswick, Maine. It was there that his interest in the Middle East was awakened, which he channeled politically by founding a group called Students for Justice in Palestine in 2014. Four years later, in 2018, he acquired US nationality, which allows him to aspire to everything except the US presidency, as it is a prerequisite to have been born in the country. 

He joined the Democratic Party, almost immediately adhering to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) movement. He was a restless activist who participated from the beginning of his militancy in the election campaigns of various candidates, most of them Muslims of Arab origin. 

That intense learning experience in the field has enabled him to carry out the successful election campaign that has now led him to become mayor of the most populous and cosmopolitan city in the country, through an overwhelming presence on social media and door-to-door conversations with the neighborhood.

Mamdani was left alone and face to face with another politically experienced Democrat, Andrew Cuomo, whom he had already defeated in the Democratic Party primaries, but who decided to run again and lost the municipal elections by 42% to 51%, which Mamdani won, both well ahead of the 7% won by Curtis Sliwa, Donald Trump's Republican Party candidate.

A victory based largely on those campaign promises, which are very difficult to fulfill and which are essentially: a freeze and even a reduction in rents; free urban transportation; extension of environmental protection, with the widespread use of renewable energies; support and financial or in-kind assistance for homosexuals; universal child healthcare; and, finally, measures to facilitate access to housing, imposing new requirements for evicting vulnerable tenants.

All of this would require a multiplication of tax revenues, i.e., significant tax increases to obtain the corresponding financing, a measure that, however, would not be up to him but to the governor of the state, fellow Democrat Kathy Hochul.

In addition to the unknowns regarding material issues, the greatest suspicions aroused by Mamdani relate to ideology. Donald Trump has insisted above all on labeling him a “communist,” which is the extreme term used in America for “socialist.”

His attacks on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been taken by much of New York's large Jewish community (some 800,000 members, the most populous city for Jews after Tel Aviv) as a threat, and it is not surprising that the most extremist media have branded him a jihadist.

Nor does he inspire indescribable sympathy among the also very large Latino community. Not far behind are his comments on social media calling for the “tearing down” of all statues and monuments honoring Christopher Columbus.

On the contrary, there is evident jubilation among New York's Muslim residents, so much so that statistical centers have revised their previous estimates, which spoke of some 200,000 individuals, raising them to almost a million, such has been the emergence of Muslims who had previously tried to remain inconspicuous.

The memory of the attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, was still very much alive, although many analysts now consider that chapter of mourning, which triggered the bloody “war on terror” declared by then-President George Bush, to be closed.