Governor Mario Cuomo said it, and repeated it in November, on the day of his resounding electoral victory: “You campaign with poetry, but you govern in prose.”
The prose time was scheduled to begin with a poem this Thursday at around 1:00 p.m. local time (7:00 p.m. in mainland Spain). It is by the writer Cornelius Eady, who composed it to be recited in Mamdani on the steps of City Hall. It says: “New York, / where your lucky self / awaits your / arrival, / where there is always land / for your roots. / This is our moment.”
The city woke up below zero and timidly covered in snow, ready for a massive ceremony that was destined to overflow the streets of Lower Manhattan surrounding City Hall, where the young mayor, , was going to be sworn in again on a historic day (another). It was the second of the day: the first was a celebration during the first minutes of the new year, in privacy and underground, in the old City Hall metro station, disused since World War II.
In addition to Eady, the program will be long and includes a DJ, musical performances and a Staten Island choir. Also mentioned is , a senator from Vermont and the figure who inspired Mamdani to get into politics. He was going to take the oath of office to the new mayor under the flags of the five districts and on a Koran that belonged to the Afro-Puerto Rican writer and activist Arturo Schomburg, today treasured by the New York Public Library, which lent it in a historic gesture: never before had a mayor used the sacred text of Islam to assume his responsibility.
The gesture was loaded with symbolism in the city of 9/11 and not far from where two enormous holes remember in an exciting memorial where the Twin Towers were. After that attack, which began the same 21st century that this Thursday entered its second quarter, the city’s Muslim community suffered an accusation denounced by Mamdani in his campaign. That now one of them is going to take the baton of command was a before and after for the Muslims of the city, but also for the community with roots in South Asia: the politician is the son of the Indian filmmaker Mira Nair and the Ugandan academic Mahmoud Mamdani.
In the access area only for guests, about 4,000, they waited, frozen from the cold, sitting on wooden chairs on the esplanade of City Hall for the congresswoman from New York to be the first to speak. His phenomenal emergence into politics in 2018 from the most progressive side of the Democratic Party laid the foundations for what would come with Mamdani.
meteoric rise
Although his rise resists comparisons: just a year ago he was a candidate for the Democratic Socialist Party of America, to which polls gave him 1%. Desperate to attract the attention of his neighbors with a message based on the struggles of the working class and controlling the cost of living, he welcomed 2025 by honoring an old New York tradition: taking a dip in the icy waters of Coney Island.
This one, a mass bath awaits you. The organization prepared for the attendance of thousands of people, including its fans, dressed in hats that say Zohran in large letters with its already unmistakable mix of orange-purple colors, curious onlookers from the five boroughs of New York and the entire United States, and tourists who did not want to miss the attraction.
Everyone was invited to the block party of Mamdani, which the new mayor organized inspired by those that the first rappers put on in the Bronx. The city has placed giant screens so that attendees could follow the broadcast of the ceremony.
It was another novelty (until now, the mayors had limited the event to the nearly four thousand guests that could fit in the City Hall grounds), as well as another sensational proof of Mamdani’s talent for staging, which marked his campaign, built on his undoubted charisma and control of gestures like that day he walked Manhattan from north to south or when he crossed the Brooklyn Bridge on foot on election day.
Campaign promises
That was the time of poetry. The prose begins with the 8.5 million inhabitants of the most populated city in the United States awaiting its performance and whether it will be able to fulfill the promises with which it conquered. Will you run the buses for free? Will you freeze rents for rent-controlled apartments? Where do you plan to get the $6 billion needed to finance universal access to daycare? And how will he manage to humanize the New York police without increasing crime?
Nobody will have an answer to those questions, and those attending Mamdani’s party, many of them, prepared for some kind of disappointment, seemed willing this Thursday to put them aside, at least, until the famous 100 days of grace that are traditionally granted to politicians and that begin with the new year on the steps of the City Hall of the unofficial capital of the world, ready to inaugurate a new era.
