Zohran Mamdani, the young socialist and Muslim who gave the surprise and will be the Democratic candidate for the Mayor's Office of New York

Born in Kampala, Uganda, Mamdani moved to New York with his family when he was 7 years old.

He studied at the Bronx High School of Science and later graduated in African studies at Bowdoin College, where he co -founded the University Section of Students for Justice in Palestine.

It is millennial Progressive, who would be the first Muslim mayor of Ugandesa and India ancestry in the city, has embraced its roots in a diverse city.

He published a campaign video entirely in Urdu, mixed with fragments of Bollywood movies. In another, he speaks Spanish.

Mamdani and his wife, Rama Duwaji, 27 -year -old Syrian artist resident in Brooklyn, met in the application of Hinge citations.

His mother, Mira Nair, is a famous film director, and his father, Professor Mahmood Mamdani, teaches at Columbia University. Both are Harvard alumni.

Mamdani presents himself as a candidate of the people and an organizer.

“As life gave its inevitable turns, with deviations in cinema, rap and writing,” says his profile in the state assembly, “it was always the organization that assured him that the events of our world would not lead him to despair, but to action.”

Before entering politics, he worked as a housing advisor, helping the owners of houses with low income from the New York neighborhood of Queens to fight eviction.

He has also made his Muslim faith a visible part of his campaign. He visited mosques regularly and published a campaign video in Urdu about the crisis of the cost of life in the city.

“We know that presenting in public as Muslim is also to sacrifice the security that we can sometimes find in the shadow,” this spring said in a mythy.

“There is no one to represent all of the issues that really worry me to be presented to the Mayor's Office, apart from Zohran,” Jagpreet Singh, political director of the organization for the social justice Drum told BBC.

Mamdani said that voters in the most expensive city in the United States want the Democrats to focus on lower prices.

“This is a city where one in four people lives in poverty, a city where 500,000 children go to sleep hungry every night,” he told the BBC in a recent event. “And, ultimately, it is a city that is in danger of losing what makes it so special.”

Its plan also includes a “comprehensive reform” of the mayor's office to hold the owners and a massive expansion of the housing permanently.

During his campaign, he linked these policies to very visual and viral gestures. He divered in the Atlantic for the freezing of rentals and broke the fast of the Ramadan in an underground train with a burrito to highlight food insecurity.

Days before the primaries, he walked throughout Manhattan, stopping to take selfies with voters.

Although he insists that he can make the city cheaper, critics question the viability of such ambitious promises.

He New York Times He did not support any candidate in the primary for the mayor's office and generally criticized the applicants. His editorial board said that Mamdani's agenda is “particularly poorly adapted to the challenges of the city” and “often ignores the inevitable sacrifices of governing.”

According to the Council, your proposal to freeze rentals would limit the housing offer.

Cuomo and others consider that Mamdani has no experience and is too radical for a city with a budget of 115,000 million dollars and more than 300,000 municipal workers.

Cuomo, backed by great donors and centrist supports such as Bill Clinton, insisted that the experience is important: “experience, competition, knowing how to do the job, knowing how to deal with Trump, knowing how to deal with Washington, knowing how to deal with the state legislature, these are basic aspects. I believe in work training, but not if you are mayor of New York.”

But Trip Yang, a political strategist, said that “experience” is not necessarily a turning point in this political era. And win or not Mamdani, Yang believes that his campaign has done “the unthinkable.”

“Zohran is promoted by tens of thousands of volunteers, hundreds of thousands of unique donors. It is very rare to see a campaign of local primary democrats in New York with this amount of volunteers and popular enthusiasm,” he said.

“He understands us. It belongs to us. It is from our community, of the immigrant community,” Lokmani Rai added.

In a recent Mamdani campaign act in a Jackson Heights park, one of the most diverse communities in the country, children ran and played on the swings, while Latin food vendors sold ice cream and snacks.

In many ways, the scene perfectly reflected the diversity of the city, which many Democrats consider the largest asset in New York. But the city is not exempt from racial and political tensions. Mamdani said he has received Islamophobic threats daily, some aimed at his family. According to the police, investigation into crimes motivated by hatred is being carried out.

He declared to the BBC that racism is indicative of what is broken in American politics and criticized a Democratic Party “that allowed Donald Trump's re -election” and has not defended the workers “no matter who were or where they came from.”

The positions of the candidates about the war between Israel and Gaza were also probably in the minds of voters.

Mamdani's firm support to the Palestinians and his criticisms of Israel faced most of the Democratic ruling class. The assemblyman presented a bill to end the tax exemption of New York's charity organizations linked to Israeli settlements that violate international legislation on human rights.

He has also said that he believes that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be stopped.

The press has pressed numerous times in interviews to declare if it supports Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state and on one occasion he said: “I do not feel comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship based on religion or on anything else, I think that in the way we have in this country, equality should be consecrated in all countries of the world. That is my belief.”

Mamdani has also said that there is no place for anti -Semitism in New York City, and added that, if chosen, financing would increase to combat crimes motivated by hatred.

Cuomo, on the other hand, has described himself as a “hyper supporter of Israel and proud of it.”

In many ways, the problems facing New York democrats are the same as the party will face in future elections, and then, the primaries can be dissected nationwide for what they say about the party – and how Trump should face.

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