Ocasio-Cortez will give opening remarks at Mamdani’s inauguration

NEW YORK — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will deliver opening remarks at Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral inauguration on New Year’s Day, Mamdani’s transition team said Tuesday.

The announcement cements a democratic-socialist all-star lineup for the inauguration ceremony outside City Hall: Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont will follow Ocasio-Cortez and administer the oath of office to Mamdani.

Ocasio-Cortez is the politician Mamdani perhaps resembles most — a youthful democratic socialist whose district overlaps Mamdani’s Assembly district in Queens and whose rise to power stunned the political establishment. She has been a vocal supporter since she endorsed him in the Democratic primary in June, saying that he was the best candidate to lead “a true working-class coalition” and defeat the centrist former governor, Andrew Cuomo.

Ocasio-Cortez has talked Mamdani up to crowds: At a rally at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens in October, where she and Sanders flanked Mamdani, she said his election would “send a loud message to President Donald Trump that his authoritarianism is no good here.”

And she has privately counseled him and accompanied him around Washington, D.C., urging skeptical fellow Democratic politicians to give him a chance.

Mamdani’s election to the state Assembly in 2020 was made possible in part by the progressive trail Ocasio-Cortez blazed when she won her seat in Congress in 2018.

On Tuesday, Mamdani said in a statement that “for the many New Yorkers who have long felt betrayed by a broken status quo,” Ocasio-Cortez “embodies a new kind of politics that puts working people at the heart of it.”

Thursday’s 1 p.m. ceremony at City Hall will follow a smaller, private swearing-in just after midnight in a grand, long-shuttered beaux-arts subway station near City Hall, at which Mamdani will formally take office as New York’s mayor. The afternoon ceremony will morph into what Mamdani’s team calls an “inauguration block party” for tens of thousands of spectators and celebrants along lower Broadway.

Mamdani said in his statement that he was proud to count Ocasio-Cortez as “a partner across the many stages of our people-powered movement — from the primary campaign to our Forest Hills rally in October to the very first day of the transition.”