This is not the time for Bill de Blasio | International

“I want to talk to you a little bit about Bill de Blasio,” says Dante, a 15-year-old African American from Brooklyn with a thick afro hair. “He is the only Democrat with the guts to break the Bloomberg years. Bill de Blasio will be a mayor for every New Yorker, no matter where they live or what they look like. And I would say this even if it wasn’t my father. ”

They are barely 30 seconds of announcement. But in a city agitated by the Occupy Wall Street movement against the inequalities exposed by the financial earthquake, which yearned for a change towards a friendly and close policy after 20 years of Bloomberg and Giuliani, many consider that this populist move, of placing her son as collateral for a loan that she asked the black community of New York, was definitive for De Blasio’s first crushing electoral victory in 2013.

Seven years later, the streets of new york burn against police violence that de Blasio promised to end. “I have asked the protesters to go home at the time of the curfew, but if they continue peacefully through the streets of the city, that will be respected,” De Blasio said Tuesday. Some hundreds, instead of going home, decided to go to the mayor’s own official residence, on the Upper East Side, where they staged a peaceful protest. It was the second time on the day that they stopped at the alderman’s house. Soon after, as they were walking down Third Avenue, the police dissolved the group and arrested 60 people for missing the curfew.

Police is one of the main powers of mayors in the United States. And most of them, in the delicate task of bringing order to the cities taken by the protests precisely against the police brutality after the murder of George Floyd, they are failing. But no failure seems more explicit than that of Bill de Blasio, who precisely came to the mayor’s office promising to stand up to the police and hold them accountable for their violence.

With a mobile in the hand of each protester, the scrutiny of the police work is total. Thus, it was possible to see how an agent approached a young man with his hands up, took down the mask that covered his nose and mouth, and sprayed him with pepper spray. Two police SUVs were also seen ramming a group of protesters in Brooklyn, hitting several, despite the fact that they had cleared the way to reverse. “I am not going to blame the agents who were trying to resolve an absolutely impossible situation,” De Blasio said Saturday. On Sunday, he announced the opening of an investigation, but praised the “tremendous containment” displayed by the police. On Monday, he strongly condemned the incident.

Meanwhile, on Sunday night, her own daughter Chiara, 25, was arrested, accused of refusing to clear a cut highway. It was a police union, very critical of De Blasio, that spread the report. “I trust my daughter,” said the mayor. “He is an incredibly good human being. He is not someone who would never commit any violence. ”

For Bill De Blasio, this is a course that one would not want even his worst enemy. It started with a surprising and extremely disappointing run for the Democratic nomination for the presidential elections in November in the party primaries. Dropped out after four months of a campaign that 76% of New York voters, according to a poll, did not see favorably. “It has been an extraordinary experience,” he concluded.

For extraordinary experiences, those that awaited the mayor. Suddenly the city became the global epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. And de Blasio’s initial resistance to taking severe measures of mobility restriction has been heavily criticized. So has that of the state governor, Andrew Cuomo, a democrat like himself but more centrist, with whom they have a historic rivalry. But, with their daily television appearances, Cuomo has managed to carve a niche in the hearts of some of the Americans. This was not the case for Bill de Blasio.

When New York was preparing to start the de-escalation, suddenly the social distancing jumps completely through the air amid the massive protests after the death of George Floyd. The businesses that were adapting their premises to reopen in a new normality, are suddenly forced to another more urgent reform: covering their windows with wooden planks to avoid looting. And De Blasio, whose mandate ends in December 2021, is caught between various unmanageable fronts: the need to maintain peace, fidelity to his electoral commitments, the obligation to stop the spread of the virus, and the urgency of reactivating a city sunk in an economic crisis of anthology. “It is clearly not my time,” admitted Bill De Blasio after leaving his presidential career. The assessment remains painfully current.

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