Zohran Mamdani becomes NYC mayor just after midnight on New Year's Day

Zohran Kwame Mamdani on New Year’s Day becomes New York City’s 112th mayor, capping the meteoric rise of a 34-year-old democratic socialist who pledged to remake the nation’s biggest metropolis into a fairer and more affordable place to live.

He’ll swear the oath of office on two Qurans, the Islamic holy book, as the city’s first Muslim mayor, the first South Asian mayor and the youngest mayor in over a century.

His dizzying ascent — he jokes that his early opinion poll support of 1% was an overly generous rounding up — follows a TikTok-savvy campaign, powered by a surge of new voters, that tapped into a majority of the electorate’s trepidation that their city was becoming evermore unaffordable.

"A new future feels very near, indeed," Mamdani said Wednesday afternoon, with hours to go before he was to take the first of two oaths of office — one, in a semiprivate ceremony just after midnight, from state Attorney General Letitia James; and another, public ceremony before 4,000 spectators cramming into the City Hall plaza at 1 p.m., with thousands more watching on Jumbotron TV screens along Broadway’s Canyon of Heroes. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders will administer that oath to Mamdani.

To enact his left-leaning platform — fare-free buses that are fast; frozen rent for regulated apartments; government-run grocery stores; tax hikes for the rich; free child care for all families — he plans to keep that electorate’s passions stoked.

But he faces steadfast opposition that could hinder his plans: a governor up for reelection who has previously ruled out the tax increases Mamdani hopes to use to fund his agenda; a president who has been cutting federal funding to the city; billionaires and business interests who spent millions, unsuccessfully, to halt his rise who haven’t declared a truce.

While he extended an olive branch to that faction by agreeing to retain outgoing Mayor Eric Adams’ police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, some of Mamdani’s appointees have skewed to the left, including Steve Banks, nominated to head the city’s legal department and who spent years suing the city on behalf of homeless New Yorkers and other downtrodden and marginalized groups. Mamdani’s chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, is a CUNY law professor who represented Muslim New Yorkers who were spied on by the NYPD and also represented Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student whom the Trump administration jailed and is trying to deport over anti-Israel activism.

And Mamdani is counting on aides who served in the Biden administration to help lead the mayoral transition, including former President Joe Biden’s trust-busting Federal Trade Commission head Lina Khan; Biden’s acting labor secretary, Julie Su, as deputy mayor for economic justice; and Sam Levine, who oversaw the Bureau of Consumer Protection for Biden, as Department of Consumer and Worker Protection commissioner.

Beyond municipal politics, Mamdani becomes one of the nation’s most prominent critics of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, a contrast with modern city mayors, Jewish or not, who have been stalwart advocates for Israel as a Jewish state. Mamdani, by contrast, believes that Israel should be a nation with equal rights for all.

Mamdani succeeds Adams, the scandal-scarred former police captain, state legislator and borough president elected in 2021 on a platform of law and order who was indicted in 2024 on corruption charges. The case was dismissed, begrudgingly, by a federal judge after the Trump administration sought to toss the case so Adams could help with President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. The indictment was just one of the scandals big and small that plagued the four-year tenure of Adams, who had initially sought a second term but dropped out in September.

To win the mayoralty, Mamdani also vanquished Andrew Cuomo, the former governor who in 2021 resigned in scandal. Cuomo, supported by billionaires’ cash, was expected to dominate in June’s Democratic primary. But in a stunning upset, Mamdani, a state assemblyman, beat Cuomo — and everyone else — by double digits.

On New Year’s Day, Adams will attend Mamdani’s inauguration, the outgoing mayor said earlier this week. Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi didn’t respond on New Year’s Eve to messages asking whether the former governor would be there too.