Will the real Jeromy Farkas please stand up? Calgary’s mayor-elect rides his new centrist identity to victory

Few politicians in Canada have rewritten their own public image quite like Calgary’s next mayor, Jeromy Farkas. Once cast as a brash populist firebrand who relished a fight at city hall and a constant thorn in then-mayor Naheed Nenshi’s side, he’s since reinvented himself as a centrist bridge builder, going as far as to recruit one of his former foe’s top progressive strategists to help steer his campaign. It was a striking reversal that captured the broader theme of his comeback since losing to Jyoti Gondek in the last municipal election. The onetime self-professed practitioner of  “ideological jackassery” is now borrowing lessons from the very establishment he once sought to disrupt. Rivals accused him of flip-flopping. Some of his most ardent supporters on the Right abandoned him, frustrated by his softer rhetoric and newfound embrace of “woke” causes. Still, voters seemed willing to give him a chance in the big seat. In a campaign defined by fatigue with ideology and with discontent over affordability and safety issues, not to mention a major infrastructure deficit, Farkas’s message of trust and competence struck a chord. His apparent victory—narrow as it was over more conservative challenger Sonya Sharp, who has indicated she will request a recount—would make him the first candidate in 45 years to unseat an incumbent Calgary mayor. So, will the real Jeromy Farkas please stand up? “Hand-grenade politics” That’s the question many are asking as he takes office. Has he truly evolved from the combative—some might even say Trumpian—councillor of his early days into a more consensus-seeking mayor? On the surface, Farkas’ story almost reads like an AI-generated template for the modern young conservative man. He was born and raised in Calgary, a child of Hungarian immigrants who fled communism; he earned a political science degree and cut his teeth at the Manning Centre alongside the likes of Ben Woodfinden; organized for the Wildrose Party; and checked all the boxes expected of a rising centre-right star. He talked tough on taxes, railed against bureaucracy, and built his brand as the lone fiscal watchdog in a council he painted as out of touch. That style sometimes bled into performative cynicism—most notably when he was ejected from a meeting in 2018 for posting misleading information about councillors’ salaries on Facebook, an act the city’s integrity commissioner later found to be in breach of council’s code of conduct. A constant provocateur, his style of “hand-grenade politics” alienated even the more fiscally prudent council members who might have been his natural allies. Yet behind the antics, there were always hints that Farkas did not quite fit the caricature. Hints of contradiction For me, the first clue came in 2014, three years before he even ran for council, when a very young Farkas in his early 20s co-wrote a report on bike lanes for the Manning Centre, then a training ground for a new generation of conservative activists. The centre in Calgary’s Beltline, founded by Reform Party leader Preston Manning, was hardly known for embracing progressive causes—least of all bike lanes. Yet the report offered a surprisingly progressive critique. It argued Calgary needed better data and broader inclusion in how it planned its cycling network, warning that existing counts were “biased” toward high-income males commuting downtown. It was, in essence, a local preview of what Caroline Criado Perez would later popularize in her 2019 book Invisible Women—the idea that a “male default” in data collection and urban design often leaves women and other groups underserved. The second clue came a couple of years later. By 2016, Farkas had become president of the Wildrose Party’s Calgary-Elbow constituency association—a party that, at the time, had backtracked on efforts to expand its human rights policy to include protections for sexual orientation. Farkas, who is openly bisexual, pushed the party in a different direction. He organized local members to march in Calgary’s Lilac Festival parade wearing shirts with the Wildrose logo overlaid with a rainbow. In a Facebook post, he urged conservatives to “demonstrate that you’re for me, rather than merely not against me.” When Farkas finally ran for council in 2017, he earned a reputation for sheer hustle—knocking on more than 20,000 doors months in advance to succeed a progressive predecessor in Ward 11. At the time, he vowed to be non-partisan. Lone dissenter on council Once elected, Farkas became the lone dissenter on many votes. He refused to accept the annual council pay increase, criticized travel and pension benefits, and made a point of publishing how each councillor voted—an act some viewed as grandstanding. He earned plenty of brownie points among voters who felt the municipal government had become a bastion of overspending and an overzealous progressive agenda. But right or wrong, he was not effective as a councillor simply because he was not collaborative. Each council member has only one vote, and so they are only as powerful as their ability to build consensus. Farkas rarely tried. He made his points forcefully, often more for show on social media, and that defiance made him a hero to his base but an outsider within the chamber. What began as a principled stand against waste gradually turned into a sort of waste itself—endless confrontation with little to show for it. That outsider posture became the foundation for his next move. Farkas was clearly always ambitious. He entered in 2021 as the clear conservative standard-bearer, promising to rein in spending and bring common sense back to council. For a while, it worked. He led early polls, drew huge crowds, and built a loyal volunteer base who saw in him a kind of truth teller and antidote to what many viewed as years of Nenshi politics. Fall from city hall But when the moment came, he couldn’t translate grievance into strategy. The more he spoke, the narrower his appeal became. His insistence on being the lone voice of reason began to sound rigid in a city weary of polarization. By election night, the result was decisive. Gondek won every ward in the city. Critics told him to take the hint and “take a hike.” So he did, literally. In the months that followed his defeat, Farkas packed his bag and set off on a 4,200-kilometre trek from the deserts of southern California to the mountains of British Columbia. What began as a physical escape soon became a symbolic one. When he returned to Calgary, the firebrand was gone. He started to focus on volunteering and fundraising for local charities. Farkas also began appearing alongside his former nemesis, Nenshi, on the local CBC morning radio show, sometimes debating, sometimes agreeing in civil, even good-humoured discussions about local politics. Slowly, the city began to see a different side of Farkas. Rebuilding the coalition Some of his former donors abandoned him, but in their place he assembled a campaign team that included industry consultant Yogi Schulz, former TC Energy executive Paul Miller, community organizer Anila Umar, and former Nenshi aide Daorcey Le Bray. The result was a platform that mixed fiscal conservatism with community-focused pragmatism. His 2025 platform pairs fiscal restraint with neighbourhood-scale fixes: ending blanket rezoning while supporting renters; reopening a permanent downtown police station; targeting repeat violent offenders; expanding transit-safety ambassadors; improving public-space design with businesses; growing a diversified economy; and increasing support for Calgary’s arts, parks, and youth programs. It’s a hybrid pitch aimed at uniting a politically exhausted city. Perhaps it took multiple failures and false starts to get to this place, or perhaps this was Farkas’ authentic self all along. When you hit midlife, all sorts of things come into focus. But this was a journey witnessed by Calgarians—and, for now at least, it appears there’s consensus on the new Farkas consensus.