‘Mr Cardamom’: the rapper socialist who has rocked New York’s mayoral race
Zohran Mamdani, a former foreclosure prevention counsellor and the son of a Bollywood producer, has the Democrat old guard worried.
Until he was five years old, Zohran Mamdani lived in a cottage on a hill above Kampala, Uganda, with a view of Lake Victoria.
He now lives in a one-bedroom flat in Queens, but by the beginning of next year, he is poised to move into Gracie Mansion as the mayor of America’s biggest city.
Mandani, 33 – a Democratic Socialist, state assemblyman since 2020, and before that a rapper who performed under the moniker Mr Cardamom – is now all but certain to win the Democratic nomination for mayor after a primary that generally selects the city’s next leader.
“In the words of Nelson Mandela, ‘It always seems impossible until it is done,’” he told cheering supporters who had gathered in Long Island City, Queens. “My friends, we have done it.”
Mamdani is the son of a Ugandan academic, Mahmood Mamdani, a specialist in colonial and post-colonial history, and Mira Nair, an acclaimed Indian film-maker.
His parents met in Kampala in 1989. They moved to Cape Town when Mamdani was five, and then to New York City after his father went to work at Columbia University, moving into a flat on the Upper West Side where his parents still live.
After college, Mamdani worked in Queens as a foreclosure prevention counsellor, trying to help people facing eviction. By then, he had become involved in politics, inspired by Bernie Sanders’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. Mamdani joined the Democratic Socialists of America and, in 2020, a pandemic year roiled by a reckoning over race after the murder of George Floyd, he was one of several Democratic Socialists to unseat a Democratic incumbent in a primary election.
He was still a relative unknown when he announced, last October, that he would run for mayor. He promised to institute a rent freeze, to make buses free and to give parents free childcare, funding the pledges by raising taxes on corporations and with a 2 per cent flat tax on those earning more than US$1m ($1.5m) a year.
“Working people are being crushed by rent and childcare,” he told the website Gothamist, one of the few outlets to cover his announcement.
“Working people are being pushed out of the city that they built.” A sceptical-sounding reporter noted that he would need to considerably boost his name recognition in the city to stand a chance.
This he did, with snappy social media videos in which he appeared all over New York, pounding the streets, a model of the happy warrior beloved in American politics. By the time of the first televised debate between 11 candidates, polls put him second, behind Andrew Cuomo.
In his victory speech yesterday (Wednesday) morning, Mamdani mentioned that he had been called by Cuomo, the former governor who represented, in Democratic politics, nearly everything that he was not. “I spoke with Andrew Cuomo about the need to bring this city together,” he said.
He thanked one of his nearest rivals, Brad Lander, the city comptroller, who had campaigned with him in the final days, asking his supporters to rank Mamdani second – an agreement that will almost certainly push Mamdami to victory in later rounds of the primary.
“Together we have shown the power of the politics of the future,” he said. “One of partnership and of sincerity.”
The Times
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