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.
“And yet, over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater. Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it.”
Beyond the triumphant claims of a mandate and recognition of his heritage and his campaign volunteers, Mamdani launched into defiant attacks on the likes of President Trump and Andrew Cuomo.
“New York, tonight you have delivered a mandate for change, a mandate for a new kind of politics, a mandate for a city that we can afford and a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that,” he said.
“We won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.”
Mamdani pledged to fulfill his pie-in-the-sky campaign promises of freezing rent for 2 million New Yorkers living in regulated apartments, making buses fast and free, universal child care and launching a Department of Community Safety that will take over mental health calls from the NYPD.
He argued his vision was essential to uplifting New Yorkers – immigrants, trans people, single mothers and more – who were left behind and couldn’t afford to make a living in the nation’s largest city.
“This will be an age where New Yorkers expect from their leaders a bold vision of what we will achieve rather than a list of excuses for we are too timid to achieve,” he said. “Central to that vision will be the most ambitious to tackle the cost of living crisis that this city has seen since the days of Fiorello LaGuardia.”
“In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light,” he said.
The speech alternated between uplifting New Yorkers and going on the offensive against those in power who did nothing but harm working people, namely Trump and Cuomo.
“My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty,” he said to raucous cheers.
“I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life. But let tonight be the final time I utter his name as we turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few.”
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Mamdani then evoked the words of Cuomo’s father Mario Cuomo: “You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.”
“When we enter City Hall in 58 days, expectations will be high. We will meet them,” he said.
Mamdani closed his speech with a promise that he’ll deliver actual results – frozen rents, affordable homes, free childcare, free buses – for everyday New Yorkers.
“New York, this power, it’s yours,” he said. “This city belongs to you.”
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