Zohran Mamdani surely never thought that being mayor of New York City would be easy. Still, in his first month in office alone, he has had to confront daunting challenges, in addition to the usual harassment from mainstream media and the right-wing tabloids. Not long after being inaugurated, the new mayor has had to contend with a deadly winter storm, a historic nurses strike at some of the city’s biggest private sector hospitals, and a national political crisis generated by the Trump administration’s lawless immigration police.
In a press conference yesterday, Mayor Mamdani revealed another major challenge: Eric Adams’s administration had left the city with a $12 billion budget hole for the next two fiscal years. So in addition to trying to raise revenue to fund his already ambitious campaign promises, Zohran must find a way to plug the giant, already-existing gap in the city’s finances.
Even just in his initial messaging around the issue, though, the new mayor is tackling the budget problem with admirable transparency rather than pretending it doesn’t exist and making a commitment to raising working-class people’s expectations rather than calling for austerity. Whereas politicians often use vague predictions of fiscal calamity as a pretext to defund public services and gut welfare programs, Mamdani is attempting to explain clearly to the public what is happening with the city budget and what he intends to do about it.
In openly communicating the fiscal problems to ordinary New Yorkers, Zohran is further developing the populist communication style that he honed on the campaign trail. That makes for a striking contrast with both the style of typical Democratic politicians, who see the nuts and bolts of government budgets as something to be worked out by technocrats behind closed doors, and the mendacious demagoguery that President Donald Trump and former mayor Adams traffic in.
So, who did…
Auteur: Nick French
