Zohran Mamdani, future mayor of New York?

Zohran Mamdani could become “the first Muslim mayor of Indian descent in New York City history,” writes Al-Jazeera . The 33-year-old is the son of a university professor and a filmmaker. He stands out for his left-wing agenda: support for Palestine, a rent freeze, free buses, and city-run supermarkets.

Zohran Mamdani's platform has been widely criticized, "from both Republicans and centrist Democrats, who accuse him of being too divisive for New York City, let alone the rest of the United States," reports Vox . "Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, for example, called Mamdani's rent freeze plan 'the best way to destroy a city – after a bombing ,'" the American site continues.

“Mamdani's program is considered far too utopian: beautiful ideas in an ideal world, impossible to put into practice in the current state of our world. Yet Mamdani's spectacular measures are not exactly innovative ideas, and he is not the first to attempt to implement them. They have been tried before, often with promising results.”

For example, his proposal to freeze rents, which would prevent rental prices from increasing in approximately one million apartments, has caused a stir. This temporary mechanism has already been used in 2015, 2016, and 2020. It allows some tenants to catch up on their financial situation.

“Mamdani’s idea of freezing rents is not an isolated fad, it is part of a broader effort to boost investment in housing and improve the lives of tenants,” Vox adds.

Municipal grocery stores, city-run supermarkets, are also a hotly debated point in Mamdani's platform. "His detractors have taken the opportunity to accuse him of being a communist who wants to end private businesses and restrict consumer choice," the website points out.

In reality, municipal grocery stores, whose aim is to sell cheaper food, since these establishments would be freed from the logic of profit, “are not really a novelty, and even less a danger,” says Vox.

“Several states, from Alabama to Virginia, have liquor stores that are publicly owned—a legacy of the post-Prohibition era, when states decided to increase their control over the sale and distribution of alcohol—and it works very well.”

Especially since Zohran Mamdani only plans to open five, one per New York neighborhood, “a drop in the ocean of 15,000 private grocery stores,” adds Vox.

"But we have to be realistic," the site believes, this policy is unlikely to have a real effect on the price of food, "grocery stores already have very low profit margins."

And this project's main goal is to "tackle the problem of food deserts in certain neighborhoods, where there is a glaring lack of grocery stores," the article explains. Because, in New York, "no one can deny that not all residents have the same access to fresh, healthy products in different neighborhoods."

Thus, Vox judges, the Democratic candidate's program is "not so radical."

But it has one advantage: it carries "within it the promise of changing the political landscape - not to make it a den of communists on the Hudson, but a place where elected officials take to heart their duty to ensure a dignified life for all their fellow citizens," believes the American media.

And that is partly why, he believes, he “resonated so strongly with voters.” ⏤