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Our main politics stories today have a distinctly international flavour. Our front page dispatch from Keith Duggan takes us right into the heart of the “fairytale in New York” for 34-year-old socialist democrat Zohran Mamdani, whose election as mayor has broken all kinds of records.
In a poll in January, Mamdani had been at just 1 per cent. Now he’s an international celebrity politician. Duggan writes how Mamdani has become the first Muslim mayor of New York, and his inaugural year in City Hall will coincide with the 25th anniversary of 9/11. He’s young, he’s comparatively politically inexperienced and he is candid about his socialism.
Though some Republicans have been gnashing their teeth about the “commie” who is about to take control of the biggest metropolitan economy in the world, some of his campaign pledges sound like they wouldn’t be out of place in a programme for government that centrist Irish voters would support: affordable groceries and childcare, more manageable rent and free public transport.
In fact, many of the promises Mamdani made on the cost of living echo some of the rhetoric that Trump used to win the 2024 US presidential election one
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