Zohran Mamdani and London mayor Sadiq Khan have much in common, but also key differences
Londoner Sadiq Khan has a lot in common with New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, but he also has many differences.
Khan, who has been mayor of the British capital since 2016, welcomed Mamdani’s victory and said New Yorkers had “chosen hope over fear, unity over division”.
Khan’s experience holds positive and negative lessons for Mamdani, a 34-year-old Democrat who defeated former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa in Tuesday’s election.
Khan has won three consecutive elections but is constantly abused for his faith and race and faces criticism from conservative and far-right commentators who portray London as a crime-ridden dystopia.
Trump has been one of his harshest critics for years; He calls Khan “utterly pathetic”, a “disgusting human being” and a “terrible mayor”, and claims the mayor wants to introduce sharia, or Islamic law, to London. Khan, a keen amateur boxer, hit back in September by saying Trump was “racist, sexist, misogynist and Islamophobic.” Khan told The Associated Press at a global summit of mayors in Brazil on Wednesday that it was “heartbreaking” but not surprising that she faced the same kind of harassment that Mamdani did.
“London is liberal, progressive, multicultural, but also successful, just like New York,” he said. “If you are a nativist, populist politician, we are the antithesis of everything you stand for.”
Mamdani and Khan, who have been attacked for their religion, regularly face harassment and threats for their Muslim beliefs, and the London mayor has significantly tighter security protection than his predecessors.
Both sought to build bridges with the Jewish community after being criticized by opponents for their pro-Palestinian stances during the Israel-Hamas war.
Both say their political rivals are prone to Islamophobia. In 2016, Khan’s Conservative rival Zac Goldsmith was accused of anti-Muslim bias for suggesting Khan had links to Islamist extremists.
Cuomo laughed along with a radio host who suggested Mamdani would “cheer” another 9/11 attack. Republicans who criticize Mamdani often call him a “jihadist” and a Hamas supporter.
Mamdani vowed during the campaign that she would “not change who I am, how I eat, or what beliefs I’m proud to hold myself.”
Khan said he felt a responsibility to dispel myths about Muslims and answered questions about his faith with weary politeness. He calls himself “a proud Englishman, a proud Englishman, a proud Londoner and a proud Muslim.”
Very different politicians Mamdani, an outsider to the left of his party; a democratic socialist whose spirited, digitally savvy campaign has energized young New Yorkers and led to the city’s largest turnout in mayoral elections in decades.
Khan, 55, is more of an establishment politician, sitting in the broad middle of the centre-left Labor Party.
The son of a Pakistani bus driver and a tailor, Khan grew up with seven siblings in a three-bedroom council flat in south London.
He studied law, became a human rights lawyer and spent a decade as a Labor MP in the House of Commons, representing the area where he grew up, before being elected in 2016 as the first Muslim leader of a major Western capital.
Mamdani comes from a more privileged background, being the son of Indian-born Ugandan anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani and award-winning Indian filmmaker Mira Nair. He was born in Uganda and raised in New York from the age of 7. Before being elected to the New York State Assembly in 2020, she worked as a counselor to tenants facing eviction.
Khan and Mamdani govern major cities with diverse populations of more than 8 million, with similar metropolitan problems. Voters in both places have similar concerns about crime and the high cost of living; These are big problems that many mayors have difficulty solving.
Khan has won three elections in a row, but he is not a very popular mayor. As Mamdani can see, even though Mamdani has made freezing rents a central plank of his campaign, the mayor is blamed for problems ranging from high rents to violent crime, regardless of whether they are under his control.
Mamdani campaigned on ambitious promises such as free child care, free buses, new affordable housing and city-run grocery stores.
“Winning an election is one thing, keeping promises is another,” said Darren Reid, an expert on US politics at Coventry University. “The mayor of New York certainly does not have unlimited power, and he will have a very powerful enemy in the current president.”
London’s mayor controls public transport and police, but he does not have the authority of New York’s leader because power is shared with the city’s 32 boroughs, which are responsible for schools, social services and public housing in their areas.
Khan can point to relatively modest achievements such as free school meals for all primary school students and a freeze on public transport fares. But it failed to achieve other goals, such as ambitious housebuilding targets.
Tony Travers, a professor at the London School of Economics who specializes in local government, said one lesson Mamdani could take from Khan was to pick “a limited number of fights you can win”.
Khan, who suffers from asthma, has made cleaning London’s air one of his main missions; The city was once so filthy it was called the Big Smoke. It expanded London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone, which charges drivers of older, more polluting vehicles a daily fee to drive in the city.
The measure became a lightning rod for criticism of Khan, leading to noisy protests and vandalism of security cameras. Khan has staunchly defended the area, which research suggests has made London’s air cleaner. His landslide victory in last year’s mayoral election appeared to confirm Khan’s stance on the issue.
Beyond their shared religion and being targets of racism, both mayors face the predicament of leading dynamic, diverse metropolises that are “surprisingly peaceful and almost embarrassingly successful” and resented by the rest of their countries for their wealth and the attention they receive, Travers said.
He said London was “locked in this strange alternate universe where it has been described by several commentators simultaneously as a kind of hellhole… but on the other hand it is so shamefully rich that British governments spend their lives trying to bring the rest of the country up to the same level.” You can’t win.”
