Mayor is in for a challenge

Mayor Karen Majewski

By Charles Sercombe
Could Hamtramck have a new mayor?
Mayor Karen Majewski has faced tough challenges in the past, but her second place finish in the recent primary election might prove to be one hurdle too many.
The top vote-getter in the mayoral primary election, which featured two others as well, was Amer Ghalib.
Ghalib has never run for elected office in Hamtramck, and he won 1,417 votes to Majewski’s 1,053 – a whopping margin of 364 votes.
The mayor last came in second place during a primary in 2013, when Abdul Algazali, who died in 2015, beat her 731-670 – a margin of 31 votes.
Majewski closed that gap in the November General Election of 2013, and ended up beating Algazali by 98 votes.
So, now the question for Majewski is: Can she once again make up for her latest primary setback?
It seems nearly impossible, but the mayor is confident she can.
“I’m confident that we can make up the deficit and win the general,” Majewski told The Review.
Ghalib was more talkative when he was asked whether he was surprised, as a newcomer to local politics, about his victory.
“This victory was expected. It’s not a coincidence, it’s the fruit of many years of serving the community and building good relationships with Hamtramck residents,” Ghalib told The Review.
“The real victory to us is the amount of love and support that we felt and received from people. With no prior campaigning experience, my team and I worked hard, and we learned a lot throughout the past few months. Our momentum is high, and we are very optimistic about the November election.”
The city council had an equally surprising result. Another newcomer to Hamtramck politics is Khalil Refai, who finished first with 19 percent of the vote, and who came out on top of the list of eight candidates.
Refai, who is a Yemeni-American, credited the Hamtramck Yemeni community for his win.
“My sincere thanks and gratitude to the people of the Yemeni-American community in Hamtramck, who honored me with this support and victory. You have my sincere support, appreciation and respect, and I hope to continue supporting and supporting the final elections, and I promise that I will do my best to serve the residents of the city in general …,” Refai said on his campaign Facebook page.
The Yemeni community appears to have become Hamtramck’s most powerful voting bloc.
Ghalib is also a Yemeni-American.
We will have more on the council race next week.
Here are some other observations about last Tuesday’s election:
August primaries are always a little melancholy for us. It’s the waning days of summer, and the living is easy (as the old Gershwin tune goes). It is a painful reminder that, come the November General Election, it’s going to be cold again.
Another long winter is about to descend.
Summers are too short in Michigan, and winters are too long and gray.
OK, enough of that.
We did not see one Majewski campaign worker at some of the polling locations. One showed up at the community center at 6:20 p.m. and her husband was out earlier.
But not all candidates had workers out there either.
Seems to us, if memory serves correctly, that the mayor lays back on primaries and comes out full force for the general election.
One thing though, there was much talk of whether she would survive this round. Majewski has been in office for 16 years and, if re-elected, she would become Hamtramck’s longest serving mayor.
There’s an old adage in politics: The longer you serve, you make more enemies than friends.
Shahab Ahmed, former councilmember and the first Bangladeshi-American to serve on Hamtramck’s city council, was observing the election.
Since he left local politics, he has been little-seen in the community.
Armani Asad, like other candidates, was too cautious to predict an outcome. He noted a common woe among candidates: people will say they support you to your face, but what they do in the privacy of the voting booth is often a different matter.
As it turned out, his second attempt to win a seat on council failed: he came in last in a field of eight candidates.
As usual, it was a heavy turnout in the morning, at lunch and around dinner time, starting at 5 p.m.
But there were no long lines or long waiting periods for voters.
This year was unlike two years ago for the presidential election: gone was the steady stream of voters you could see all day long. But then again, that was a hotly contested presidential election – and an election that the nation is still arguing over.

For those living across from the polling stations inside the Community Center, election day is chance to hang out for the day, share tea and enjoy watching campaign workers.

Across from the community center, two houses were hosting porch parties, one for Abu Musa and another for Muhith Mahmood. There was a mutual serving of tea, which was reflective of the laid back, and congenial, atmosphere of most primary elections in Hamtramck.
There were the typical few instances of overzealous candidates and their supporters being told to stop their aggressive campaigning at the precincts, but nothing out of the ordinary.
This was City Clerk Rana Faraj’s first-ever election to oversee. As you would expect, she was a bit frazzled, but held it together.
Unlike her predecessor, August Gitschlag, she is not the boisterous type, whereas Gitschlag did not hold back from telling candidates to back off.
When we visited city hall, residents were registering to vote, which Michigan election allows. It was inspiring to see people go out of their way to participate in their civic duty – even if it’s the last chance to do so on an election day.
Hamtramck elections are always amazing, in the sense that they give you a view of the wide spectrum of ethnicities who live here.
Weird, though, how the camaraderie among candidates on election days changes so drastically once they make it to council. The meetings can often turn divisive, not too long after the election victory buzz wears off.
If only one could bottle that election day spirit, and then pop it open when things go sideways at council meetings.
As Rodney King famously said: “Can we, can we get along?”
See you in November.
Posted Aug. 13, 2021