The SDP won the 2000 local elections. Bandić won a third mandate as representative in the Zagreb Assembly, and was elected mayor of Zagreb by the Assembly on 31 May. He took office on 2 June 2000. In his first term as mayor, Bandić emphasized social issues. He held a session of the Assembly in one of the poorest and mostly illegally built neighborhood of Kozari Bok in the Peščenica – Žitnjak district, with a population of Roma and refugees. A photograph of him in a suit walking over a mud puddle, made during a tour of the neighborhood, was later used in his political campaigns to present Bandić as a "man of the people". The subsequent construction of communal infrastructure in the neighborhood made Bandić particularly popular among the Roma community of Zagreb. He focused his messages on the lower middle class and the poor, introduced a more direct and personal model of governing the city, and expanded welfare benefits. His model of governance, maintained throughout his tenure, was partly based on the late socialist self-management system of 1980s Yugoslavia, when a combination of socialist populism and clientelism was common in the management of large state-owned enterprises.