Tale of two city mayors Mamdani joins Khan on divided world stage

While the soon-to-be first Muslim mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, was in the final throes of his mayoral campaign on a brisk day in New York, Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim mayor of London, was wrapping up a two-day climate summit in a steamy if overcast Rio de Janeiro.

- Daniel Boffey Rio de Janeiro

"Hope is not gone," Khan told the 300 city mayors gathered in the city's museum of modern art.

The London mayor was referring to the challenges faced by regional politicians in dealing with the climate emergency in the face of the scepticism or outright denial of the science by national governments - including that led by Donald Trump.

But on hearing of Mamdani's win, Khan suggested that this too had given him hope. London and its mayor have been repeatedly raised by figures such as Trump's former chief of staff Steve Bannon as the disastrous outcome that New Yorkers had to avoid.

"In recent years, there's been a growing chorus of commentators and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic attacking London and New York for their liberal values," Khan said. "They paint a picture of a lawless dystopia in an attempt to sow fear and division.

But ask most Londoners or New Yorkers, and you'll find that this narrative falls on deaf ears. Many of the challenges our cities face are similar, but they are not identical.

But we are united by something far more fundamental: our belief in the power of politics to change people's lives for the better." He later tweeted: "New Yorkers faced a clear choice - between hope and fear - and just like we've seen in London - hope won." Khan, 55, the London-born son of Amanullah and Sehrun Khan, a bus driver and seamstress respectively, who arrived in Britain from Pakistan in 1968, achieved a historic third term as mayor on the Labour ticket in May last year.

Mamdani, the son of a Ugandan academic, Mahmood Mamdani, a specialist in colonial and postcolonial history, and Mira Nair, an acclaimed film-maker, made his own history on Tuesday as a Democrat picking up nearly 200,000 more votes in New York than his nearest rival, the former state governor Andrew Cuomo.