Mamdani To Meet The Monarchs

NEW YORK — The British royals were once welcomed to New York City with a ticker tape parade. This week, they’ll have to settle for a solemn appearance with Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

King Charles III and Queen Camilla are set to arrive in the nation’s largest city Wednesday as part of their four-day U.S. visit — ostensibly to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, privately to conduct an emergency diplomacy mission aimed at President Donald Trump amid fraying transatlantic relations.

At a planned wreath laying ceremony at Ground Zero, the heads of the royal family will also come face to face with an ascendant wing of the Democratic Party whose ideals run counter to the notion of a monarchy and, in Mamdani, a standard bearer whose personal history is bound up with the legacy of British imperialism.

“I will be attending the wreath-laying … to pay tribute to the more than 3,000 who were killed in the horrific terror attacks of Sept. 11,” the mayor said Monday. “And that will be the extent of my meeting with the king and with others who are present.”

His cool approach is worlds away from how past Gotham mayors interacted with the royals. Former Mayor Robert Wagner threw the ticker-tape parade in 1957. Nearly twenty years later, Abe Beame’s granddaughter greeted Queen Elizabeth II with a bouquet of flowers as her highness’ ship landed in Manhattan’s Battery Park. Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani were both recognized by the late Queen as Honorary Knight Commanders of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

Mamdani, in contrast, would not even confirm his attendance at the 9/11 ceremony when POLITICO first reported the likely meeting last week, only coming clean Monday while barely mentioning the city’s highborn guests.

The mayor has shown himself willing to meet with those far outside his political milieu — John Catsimatidis, a billionaire oil, real estate and grocery store mogul who tried to tank Mamdani’s campaign, was recently spotted in City Hall. And the democratic socialist has struck up a surprisingly chummy relationship with Trump.

But the mayor’s initial, less-than-enthusiastic reception to the royals should not come as a surprise.

Mamdani, the son of a filmmaker and an academic specializing in African politics and post-colonial studies, owes his political career to fighting for the redistribution of wealth. He grew up immersed in the thinking of his father, who has written on the lasting impacts of British colonial rule in Africa — including in Uganda, where the Mamdani family lived until the mayor was 5. Just last month, the mayor drew parallels between the war in the Middle East and British rule over Ireland.

“The story of the Irish, both in Ireland and in New York City, is at one time a story of oppression, of subjugation, and of discrimination,” the mayor said at a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast. “As we know, it was on Irish soil that the British Empire developed their colonial project.”

The bulk of the royal visit will transpire in Washington, where Charles emphasized in an address Tuesday to Congress the longstanding economic and cultural ties between the United States and its closest ally across the pond.

“The bond of kinship and identity between America and the United Kingdom is priceless and eternal,” he told a receptive audience on Capitol Hill. “It is irreplaceable and unbreakable.”

The monarch also met privately with Trump beforehand in the hopes of thawing an increasing frostiness between the president and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whom Trump blames for insufficiently contributing to the war in Iran.

In New York City, the king and queen are expected to make a stop at a Ground Zero ceremony in lower Manhattan alongside Mamdani, Bloomberg and other elected officials including the governors of New York and New Jersey.

“My wife and I will again pay respect to the victims, the families and the bravery shown in the face of terrible loss,” Charles said during his address. “We stood with you then, and we stand with you now.”

The royal couple are then expected to hit up several events that include a stop for the queen at the New York Public Library before departing to Virginia for the last leg of their journey.

Compared to decades ago, royal visits to the Big Apple come with less pomp these days.

In 2010, the last time Elizabeth II visited New York City, she addressed the United Nations before attending, alongside Prince Philip, a 9/11 wreath laying ceremony with Bloomberg. After meeting with families of victims and first responders, Elizabeth and Bloomberg then chatted during an event at a Manhattan garden bearing her name, years before she would go on to bestow the billionaire with honorary knighthood.

Mamdani’s posture toward officials of various stations and political stripes has at times proven to be unexpected — with November’s meeting with Trump the prime example. So there is no telling how he will handle his brush with royalty. The king and queen are apolitical officials whose time in the public eye is largely spent on charity missions and soft diplomacy at home and abroad. But the monarchy nevertheless hearkens back to a bygone era Mamdani is acutely aware of.

Last year, the mayor’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, published a book called Slow Poison, which argues that the legacy of British rule played a role in the brutal dictatorship of late Ugandan strongman Idi Amin, who expelled Indian families like Mamdani’s that had immigrated to the continent decades before.

In an interview with NPR, Mahmood Mamdani said that questions about identity, immigration and belonging were all things he discussed with his son beginning at a young age, when they had left Uganda and were living in South Africa.

“These conversations were conversations that were there when he was 7, 8, 9 in Cape Town,” Mahmood Mamdani said. “They were conversations about who is a South African.”

Yasser Ali Nasser, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee’s history department who has written about the intersection between democratic socialism and the British monarchy, argued that the left has taken varying attitudes toward royalty around the globe. In Sweden, for example, he noted the democratic socialist party does not make ending the monarchy, which is less prominent than the king and queen of England, a main part of its platform.

He told POLITICO in an email that opposition to hierarchical monarchies is a legacy of liberal democracy that established voting rights, and that it is especially prevalent in American political thinking given the revolution. He added, however, that modern democratic socialists might have additional reasons to criticize the existence of royal families.

“We might oppose monarchs not just because they contradict the promise of equality,” he wrote, “but because they also benefit from wealth and privileges granted to them by the state as a birthright, thus acting as a drain on public coffers.”