Sadiq Khan re-elected as London Mayor for third term | the world

Labour’s Sadiq Khan has been re-elected for a third term as mayor of London, an unprecedented move in the British capital, according to data released this Saturday (4).

Khan, the son of Pakistani immigrants and London’s first Muslim mayor, is 53 and has been in office since 2016, defeating conservative candidate Susan Hill.

According to the “BBC”, Khan had 1,088,225 votes (43.8% of the total), to Hill’s 811,518 (32.7% of the total), a difference of just 276 thousand votes. Khan won nine of the 14 constituencies

In doing so, he overtook his predecessor and former conservative British Prime Minister Boris Johnson for two terms.

“It has been the honor of my life to serve the city I love, and I feel beyond honored at this moment,” Khan told supporters after the election results were announced, and he set out to “repay the trust” of voters. Capital is “fair, safe and green”.

As mayor, he was a vocal critic of Brexit and successive conservative government leaders, and clashed with then-US President Donald Trump, who in 2017 accused him of failing in the fight against terrorism and called him a “loser”.

But Trump got his revenge when he was defeated by Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

“He called me a … loser once. There’s only one of us losers, and it’s not me,” he said.

Khan, with a very different trajectory from the British elite, became a symbol of the country’s diversity.

His father, a bus driver, and mother, a seamstress, immigrated from Pakistan in the 1960s and raised their children in public housing.

He attended a public school in north London and studied law at the University of North London, a free education he was always grateful for. “I owe everything to London,” he said.

He wanted to be a doctor or dentist. But one of his teachers noticed his gift for oratory and directed him to study law. He followed the advice, specialized in human rights and headed the NGO Liberty for three years.

Apart from using books, Khan knew how to defend himself with his fists and learned to box from an early age to counter those who called him “Baki”, a derogatory term for Pakistanis.

At 15, he joined the Labor Party and in 1994, aged 23, he was elected as a councilor in Wandsworth, a borough in south London.

In 2005, he gave up his career as a lawyer to be elected MP for Tooting, where he has lived all his life and now lives with his wife Saadia, a lawyer, and their two teenage daughters.

Three years later, then Labor Prime Minister Gordon Brown appointed him Minister for Communities and the following year Minister for Transport. He was the first Muslim to hold the post of minister.