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He is the left-leaning Muslim mayor of the country’s largest city and the US President donald trump Is one of his biggest critics,
of london Sadiq Khan It has a lot in common with the newly elected mayor of New York Zohran Mamdani – But there are many differences too.
Khan, who has been mayor of the British capital since 2016, Mamdani’s victory welcomedSaying that New Yorkers have “chosen hope over fear, unity over division.
“Khan’s experience has positive and negative lessons for Mamdani, the 34-year-old Democrat who defeated the former New York governor. Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate in Tuesday’s election.
Khan has won three consecutive elections, but regularly faces abuse for his faith and race, as well as criticism from conservative and far-right commentators, who portray London as a crime-ridden dystopia.
Trump has been one of his harshest critics over the years, calling Khan “a stupid person”, a “bad person” and a “terrible mayor”, and claiming the mayor wants to bring Sharia, or Islamic law, to London.
Khan, an avid amateur boxer, hit back in September, saying Trump “is racist, he’s sexist, he’s misogynistic and he’s Islamophobic.”
Khan told The Associated Press during the global mayors summit in Brazil on Wednesday that it is “heartbreaking” but not surprising that Mamdani gets the same kind of abuse he does.
He said, “London is liberal, progressive, multicultural, but also successful – as is really New York.” “If you are a nativist, populist politician, we are the opposite of everything you stand for.”
were attacked for their religion
Mamdani and Khan regularly receive abuse and threats because of their Muslim faith, and the Mayor of London receives much tighter security than his predecessors.
The two have tried to build bridges with the Jewish community after being criticized by opponents for their pro-Palestinian stance during the Israel-Hamas war.
Both say that their political rivals have leaned towards Islamophobia. In 2016, Khan’s conservative opponent, Zac Goldsmith, was accused of anti-Muslim bias for suggesting that Khan had ties to Islamic extremists.
Cuomo laughed with radio host who made the suggestion Mamdani may be “cheering” for another 9/11 attackMamdani’s Republican critics often incorrectly call him a “jihadi” and a Hamas supporter.
Mamdani vowed during the campaign that he would “not change who I am, how I eat, or the faith I am proud to call my own.”
Khan has said that he feels a responsibility to dispel myths about Muslims and answers questions about his faith with great grace. He calls himself “a proud Briton, a proud Englishman, a proud Londoner and a proud Muslim”.
very different politicians
Mamdani is an outsider to the left of his party, a democratic socialist whose spirited, digital-savvy campaign energized young New Yorkers and drove the city’s largest electoral turnout in a mayoral election in decades.
Khan, 55, is an established politician who sits in the broad center of the centre-left Labor Party.
The son of a bus driver and a tailor from Pakistan, Khan grew up with seven siblings in a three-bedroom public housing apartment in south London.
He studied law, became a human rights lawyer and spent a decade as a Labor Party lawmaker 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 city.
Mamdani comes from a more privileged background Born in India, he is the son of Ugandan anthropologist, Mahmood Mamdani, and award-winning Indian filmmaker Mira Nair. Born in Uganda and raised in New York from the age of 7, he worked as a counselor for tenants facing eviction before being elected to the New York State Assembly in 2020.
Similar problems of big cities
The Khans and Mamdanis rule over vast cities with a highly diverse population of over 8 million. Voters in both places have similar concerns about crime and the high cost of living – big issues that many mayors struggle to address.
Khan won three consecutive elections, but won Not a very popular mayorAs Mamdani may have also discovered, the mayor is to blame for many of the problems High fares for violent crime, Regardless of whether they were under his control or not, however, Mamdani made freezing rents a pillar of his campaign.
Mamdani campaigned on ambitious promises including free child care, free buses, new affordable housing, and city-operated grocery stores.
“Winning elections is one thing, keeping promises is another,” said Darren Reed, an expert on American politics at Coventry University. “The mayor of New York certainly doesn’t have unlimited power, and he’s going to have a very powerful enemy in the sitting president.”
The Mayor of London controls public transport and the police, but does not have the authority of the leader of New York 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, including free school meals for all primary school pupils and a freeze on transit fares. But he has failed to meet other targets, such as the ambitious home-building target.
Tony Travers, a professor at the London School of Economics who specializes in local government, said a lesson Mamdani could take from Khan was to “pick a limited number of fights that you can win.”
Khan, who suffers from asthma, has made it one of his main missions to clean up London’s air – once so dirty the city was nicknamed the Big Smoke. He London’s ultra low emission zone expandedWhich charges drivers of older, more polluting vehicles a daily fee for driving in the city.
The measure became a lightning rod for criticism of Khan, prompting noisy protests and the vandalism of enforcement cameras. Khan staunchly defended the area, whose research showed London’s air became cleaner. His landslide victory in last year’s mayoral election appeared to vindicate Khan’s stance on the issue.
Travers said that beyond their shared religion and being the target of racism, both mayors face the challenge of leading dynamic, diverse metropolises that are “surprisingly peaceful and almost embarrassingly successful” – and that offend the rest of their country because of their wealth and the attention they receive.
He said London is “locked in this weird alternate universe, where it’s described as a hell by multiple commentators at once – and yet on the other hand it’s so embarrassingly rich that British governments spend their lives trying to make the rest of the country catch up with it. You can’t win.”