In Budapest, it was a call to flout the Hungarian government’s ban on Pride that catapulted the city’s mayor into the headlines. In Barcelona it was a bold plan to rid the city – one of Europe’s most visited – of tourist flats by late 2028. And in Paris, it was a drastic makeover; one that included making the Seine swimmable and turning its car-clogged riverbanks into pedestrian-friendly areas.
The mayors’ actions – and the global conversation they elicited – hinted at how, in much of the world, the role of mayor has been recast. Gone are the stereotypes of endless ribbon cutting ceremonies and flesh-pressing events; instead mayors are increasingly being thrust on to the frontlines of some of society’s thorniest challenges.
“I think mayors around the world have started to realise that we have a new role, one that didn’t exist before,” said Jaume Collboni, the mayor of Barcelona. “We’ve realised that the global problems we’re all facing require local solutions.”
When he took the reins in Barcelona in 2023, Collboni noticed that one topic came up repeatedly in his discussions with other mayors: the soaring cost of housing. The observation swiftly snowballed into Mayors for Housing, an unprecedented alliance of 17 mayors across the continent seeking solutions to the crisis.
“We’re the ones on the frontlines of citizens’ daily lives,” said Collboni. “So it’s not surprising that we’re also the ones saying that things can’t continue this way.”
From Zohran Mamdani to Sadiq Khan, the increasingly global profile of mayors has led to heightened scrutiny of their actions, propelling some of them into the crosshairs of the culture wars. In Paris, for example, mayor Anne Hidalgo’s years-long effort to create 15-minute neighbourhoods and make the city greener was lauded by progressives around the world, while far-right and centre-right forces pushed back against the initiatives.
Collboni saw it as a moment in which cities were rising up after decades of being overlooked, particularly in the EU where much of the focus has been on subsidies for farmers and rural development.
“Basically we’re saying that if there’s any place in Europe where European values and democracies are being defended, it is in our cities,” he said. “For the most part, cities, whether in the United States or Europe, continue to be bastions of open, inclusive societies, where progressives are the majority.”
He contrasted the practical solutions being offered by the mayors’ alliance – from pushing for EU funding for affordable housing to crackdowns on tourist lets – with the far right’s scapegoating. “We all know that where the far right is already governing, things haven’t changed at all,” he said. “The difference is that hate speech has made inroads, along with division and confrontation, while the rights we all fought for have been eroded.”
At the London School of Economics, where professors have been tracking the changes in cities over the past 20 or 30 years, Ricky Burdett, director of LSE Cities and a professor of Urban Studies, said it’s clear that the role of mayor has become increasingly significant in many cities.
He attributed this shift to two factors. The first was the rate at which urban populations are growing, with 70% of the world’s population expected to live in cities by 2050. “And the second is that they are on the frontline – and increasingly so – of everything that matters,” he said, pointing to the climate crisis, environmental issues and social challenges.
“If a city floods, it’s a mayor that has to deal with it. If LA has fires, it’s the mayor’s department that has to make sure that the fire service works or the hydrants work. If you have a sudden influx of refugees … it’s the mayor and local administration who has to also deal with that,” he said. “This has also happened at a time when the financial ability of cities to deal with many of these things has been under threat, because of reduced income, tax income and power struggles.”
In October, the university launched a new leadership and management programme, the Bloomberg LSE European city leadership initiative, aimed specifically at mayors across Europe, building on a similar initiative launched at Harvard University in 2018.
The programme provides mayors in office – the inaugural class included 30 from across Europe – with the strategies, skills and networks needed for a position that comes with little formal training, and as rightwing rhetoric and social media ramp up the pressures they’re facing.
Perhaps nowhere has this struggle been more evident than in Budapest, where the mayor, Gergely Karácsony, in June rallied tens of thousands of citizens to defy the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and his government’s effort to ban the city’s annual Pride march.
“I think the relationship between Budapest and Hungary is, in some ways, a laboratory of global trends that you now see around the world,” said Karácsony. Since Orbán took power in 2010, his rightwing populist government has been steadily choking off funding to the city, while doing it all can to curb the cultural and economic influence of a city that is home to around a third of the country’s population.
“Government propaganda is constantly attacking us, we are under huge political pressure – that’s the environment we’re working in,” said Karácsony, citing the police questioning of him as a suspect after the Pride march. In December, Hungarian police recommended that Karácsony face charges over his role in in the march, though it remains to be seen if prosecutors will concur.
At the same time, the government’s “financial chokehold”, as he described it, was straining the city’s ability to provide even the most basic services. “We’re on the brink of not being able to pay the wages of our municipal workers,” he said.
The clash has turned Budapest into an extreme example of the pressures that some mayors are facing. “I would be the happiest if I could just focus on being mayor instead of trying to uphold democracy with our last breath,” said Karácsony. “I was speaking to a mayor of a big European capital, and they said they were a bit envious of the international support and solidarity. I told them that I would be very happy to swap, but that I would also give them Viktor Orbán,” he added with a laugh.
But while his experience as mayor has convinced him that local governments have a critical role to play in global politics, he cautioned against those who would use Budapest’s experience to project a wider conflict between rightwing populist nationalists and progressive city mayors.
“It’s risky because if there’s a populist government that can point at liberal cities and fuel the moral panic of countryside voters, this polarisation is what really feeds populism. So you’re just playing into their hands,” he said, citing his constant efforts to frame the city’s development as a boon for the nation as a whole. “I really don’t like it when we talk about major cities as islands of democracy, because that brings us back to the middle ages when cities had walls around them.”
