EIt only took ten minutes for the winner to be determined: at ten past nine, when the polling stations had just closed, the American news agencies announced that Eric Adams would be the 110th mayor of New York. The 61-year-old Adams began his professional career as a police officer and rose to the rank of captain before becoming Senator of New York State in 2006 and Borough President of Brooklyn in 2013. Now Adams becomes the second African American head of the city; the first was David Dinkins, who ruled from 1990 to 1993. Adams campaigned on security, police reform, and the impact of the coronavirus and the economic crisis on workers and the middle class. In contrast to the left wing of the party, he emphasized the central role that entrepreneurs must play in the recovery of the city – this earned him the support of former incumbent Michael Bloomberg.
Adams also opposes calls by many New York activists to reform the often violent police force with funding cuts. As the head of an interest group of black police officers, he once spoke out against the practice of “stop and frisk”, in which officers can stop and search people without cause. In recent years, Adams changed his position on this: He advocates the procedure as long as the rules against racial discrimination are respected. With the subject of crime, Adams was able to score across all walks of life. Crime rates are still low in New York, at least when compared to previous decades and other American cities, but the doubling of gun violence in the first year of the pandemic and the 44 percent increase in homicides worries many citizens.
Adams, who was briefly a Republican years ago, is considered a powerful representative of the Democratic Party establishment in New York, known as the “Democratic Machine”. He has been criticized in the past for his proximity to major real estate investors. The party left also doesn’t like the fact that he works closely with Frank Carone, one of the most influential men in town and longtime lawyer for the Democrats. Much like incumbent Bill de Blasio, Adams also faced questions about his campaign funding. Adams’ donors are often wealthy entrepreneurs, occasionally also police officers, who have legal difficulties because of dubious methods. Critics also complain that Adams does not have a proper political program. And in his party he apparently has many enemies. In New York Magazine they were anonymously quoted as saying that Adams was one of the abundant urban politicians who took the film “The Godfather” as a model for their power games.
A weak Republican candidate
It comes as no surprise, however, that Adams was elected. In New York, the Democrats have a strong majority behind them. Adams’ Republican competitor Curtis Sliwa was also a weak, albeit colorful, candidate. The founder of the “Guardian Angels” citizen patrol is best known for having confessed in the early 1990s to staging some rescue operations of allegedly threatened citizens in the subway and to faking his own kidnapping. On election day, Sliwa got into an argument at the polling station because he was not allowed to bring his cat inside.
– .
