Zohran Mamdani takes office as NYC mayor with a commitment to enacting agenda for city's poor and working class

New York City Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani on Thursday promised to "govern expansively and audaciously" as a democratic socialist by enacting the platform that powered his populist campaign and by prioritizing the poor and working class over the rich.

In an inaugural address on his first day in office as the chief executive of Wall Street’s hometown, Mamdani said he would not back down from his push to tax the rich and expand social services through initiatives such as free buses, free child care, government-run grocery stores and a rent freeze for almost 2 million rent-regulated tenants.

"We may not always succeed. But never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try," Mamdani said in an address delivered over 24 minutes before a freezing audience of 4,000 seated in City Hall Plaza and thousands more listening to a telecast at a lower Manhattan block party. "To those who insist that the era of big government is over, hear me when I say this — no longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers’ lives."

Mamdani’s inauguration as the 112th mayor — his oath of office was taken on two Qurans, and he was sworn in by his democratic socialist hero U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — caps the unlikely ascent of a man who was an unknown Queens assemblyman less than a year earlier.

But powered by a TikTok-savvy campaign — exactly one year ago, he starred in a viral video by running into the ocean, clad in a suit, to illustrate how he’d freeze the rent — Mamdani tapped the frustrations of a city growing precipitously more unaffordable. Mamdani, now 34, trounced juggernaut Andrew M. Cuomo, a dynastic politician and ex-governor almost twice his age who was backed by billionaires and expected to win the mayoralty with ease.

Mamdani is the city’s first Muslim mayor, the first South Asian mayor and the youngest mayor in over a century. He sat on the stage with his wife, artist Rama Duwaji, along with his parents, Columbia Professor Mahmood Mamdani and filmmaker Mira Nair.

Zohran Mamdani legally became mayor at 12:01 a.m. on New Year’s Day and was first sworn in to office in a semiprivate ceremony held in a decommissioned subway station beneath City Hall Plaza by state Attorney General Letitia James. He worked into the night at City Hall and returned the next morning in a yellow taxicab driven by a cabbie he met more than four years earlier at a protest. The public swearing in was Thursday afternoon.

New Yorkers living 'paycheck to paycheck'

Within hours of that ceremony, Mamdani was in the lobby of a Brooklyn rental apartment building where tenants chanted about alleged unlivable conditions. Seated at a mayoral desk carried into the lobby for the occasion, Mamdani signed pro-tenant executive orders and appointed the head of a newly beefed-up Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.

Separately, Mamdani revoked all executive orders signed by his predecessor, Eric Adams, that were issued after Adams was indicted on since-dismissed corruption charges on Sept. 26, 2024. Mamdani spokeswoman Monica Klein later said the mayor had revoked nine orders, reissued seven verbatim and amended three.

Adams decided at the last minute to attend the inauguration ceremony. He barely clapped and sat stone-faced as Mamdani lobbed barbs about how past leaders had squandered "moments of great possibility" and "promptly surrendered to small imagination and smaller ambition."

The public, Mamdani said, has come to expect "mediocrity from those who serve the public."

"We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism," Mamdani said.

There was no doubt the city has taken a sharp turn to the left.

The opening speaker, Democratic superstar Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of Queens, said: "We have chosen prosperity for the many over spoils for the few."

Participants in the ceremony — at which the new city comptroller, Mark Levine, and the incumbent public advocate, Jumaane Williams, were also sworn in — included immigrants who had been swept up in President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

An invocation by Imam Khalid Latif, director of the Islamic Center of New York City, spoke of New Yorkers "living paycheck to paycheck in the shadow of unimaginable wealth." Singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus performed the early 20th century protest anthem "Bread and Roses." Cornelius Eady, the inaugural poet, who once taught at Stony Brook University and elsewhere, dedicated the poem to his "trans, queer, foreign students of color." Jewish actor and singer Mandy Patinkin, a Mamdani supporter who lit Hanukkah candles with the then-candidate last month, led Staten Island schoolchildren in "Over the Rainbow." 

Mamdani’s guests included a co-chair of his transition committee, former President Joe Biden’s trustbusting Federal Trade Commission head Lina Khan, and Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student and pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protester whom the Trump administration jailed and is seeking to deport.

Pressure over tax hikes

Mamdani did not directly mention one of his most cherished personal causes — advocating for the rights of Palestinians and against Israeli policies — but he said in his mayoralty, Palestinian New Yorkers "will no longer have to contend with a politics that speaks of universalism and then makes them the exception."

Some elements of Mamdani’s mayoral agenda, such as government-run grocery stores, can be enacted unilaterally, but to make buses free, he’ll need the backing of the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority. And to raise most taxes, the state must approve.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, who initially ruled out tax hikes as she runs this year for reelection but last month softened her position, got yet another preview of the pressure she’ll face from Mamdani’s supporters during his tenure.

As Sanders riffed that hiking taxes on the wealthiest and biggest corporations "is not radical," the crowd broke out in chants of "tax the rich!" identical to the chanting that had drowned her out at a Mamdani campaign rally in October.

Beyond City Hall Plaza, a crowd Mamdani spokeswoman Dora Pekec said numbered about 40,000 packed Broadway’s Canyon of Heroes for the block party, where they listened to the ceremony beamed onto  large screens.

Elissa Stein, 61, who is originally from Massapequa and now lives in Manhattan’s West Village, was singing on Thursday morning on Liberty Street with other members of Sing Out, Louise! NYC, all decked out in pink and wearing sashes that read "Vote, resist, sing."

The group puts a political spin on pop and show tunes.

"We speak out, and we inspire people to be on the streets, to protest, to be activists with joy and with song. There's nothing more joyous than Zohran Mamdani being inaugurated today," she said. "He's bringing hope. He's bringing inspiration. He's getting young people motivated. We have a lot of fighting still left to do."

Jay W. Walker, 58, of Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, also with the singing group, said the group wrote three new songs for Mamdani.

"We love him, we are pulling for him," he said. "We are standing with him."