It is rare that the election of a student union president merits the flurry of headlines that greeted Malia Bouattia. But her election, as the first black Muslim woman to hold the office, has been one of the most divisive moments in the National Union of Students’ recent history.

Bouattia’s supporters hail it as a powerful victory for diversity and radical politics; her critics lament her election as a disturbing choice that could lead to an irreconcilable schism between the union and mainstream student opinion.

Jewish students’ groups say they are particularly alarmed. Bouattia, 28, has been filmed decrying the influence of the “Zionist-led media”, described her university “Zionist outpost” in a paragraph mentioning the university’s large Jewish society, and spoke at a meeting advertised using a poster featuring Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah.

But at this week’s NUS conference, Bouattia was overwhelmingly popular choice, winning on the first round by more than 50 delegate votes and unseating the incumbent, Megan Dunn, an extremely rare occurrence.

Her two years as NUS black students’ officer have undoubtedly been significant: she testified at the UN about the chilling effects of anti-extremism programmes on academic freedom; Bouattia pushed for more diverse student representation, including more minority ethnic candidates and for a permanent officer for transgender students; on stage at NUS conference, her voice quivering, she gave an evocative and deeply personal speech about her past as a child refugee, thumping the lectern as she vowed to fight government cuts to bursaries, schools and the NHS.

But within a few hours of her victory, students at the University of Cambridge called for a referendum on whether their union should disaffiliate from the NUS. Two days later, students at Oxford, York, Durham, Edinburgh, King’s College London and the London School of Economics had called for their own unions to sever ties with NUS, plunging the union into crisis.

Jack May, the leader of the Cambridge campaign to disaffiliate, called Bouattia’s election “a horrifying message to Jewish students in the UK”. In its editorial leader this week, the Jewish Chronicle said: “The election of Bouattia as president of the NUS leaves no doubt as to where that organisation now stands.”

#GenerationVote poster with Malia Bouattia. Photograph: Vicky Design/NUS website

Bouattia, who will not become president formally until July, has pledged to meet the students who oppose her so vehemently and said she was planning to keep a low profile until her term begins. “One of the most important steps is to meet with everyone, to talk about these concerns, to heal the divisions,” she told the Guardian following her election.

A fierce leftwing campaigner whose family fled the Algerian civil war after terrorists planted a bomb at her father’s university, Bouattia earned her activist stripes in national social justice campaigns and in the Palestinian solidarity movement, talking part in walkouts to protest against the war in Iraq even before she left school in Birmingham.

But Bouattia has described that by the time she started at the University of Birmingham, she felt isolated and disconnected from mainstream student life, and struggled with mental health and academic pressures. It was there she launched an ambassador scheme for black students to tackle what she described as Eurocentric curriculums and lobbying for better female representation in academia.

Her first degree was in culture studies with French followed by an MPhil in post-colonial theory; it was during this time that she became a student union rep, beginning her NUS career.

Her passions and priorities, however, lie in global politics rather than student issues, which she acknowledged in her election speech at NUS conference. Bouattia has been a vocal ally of the Black Lives Matter movement, touring the US to speak about racism on both sides of the Atlantic. At a debate last year, she was critical of the disparity of focus in the media on victims of violence depending on skin colour, lamenting “the continued genocide of black lives internationally at the hands of legitimised terrorists – the police”.

She is a frequent critic of the “colonisation” of curriculum at British universities and the white-centred focus of literature and history, one of the key points of the influential Rhodes Must Fall campaign at Cape Town and Oxford universities and elsewhere.

Michael Segalov, a member of the NUS NEC, describes her as the same person onstage as off, he said, because she does not switch off. “She is dedicated to it, 100% of the time. She doesn’t stop, it’s every day, all over the country. I have never seen her ever turn down an invitation to speak, anywhere, only if there’s a clash. And it’s not to promote herself, it’s to promote the movement, of anti-racism, anti-fascism which she has dedicated herself to for years.”

Bouattia has also been a regular speaker at rallies and debates on Israel, but her choice of language has sometimes appeared to echo some deeply disturbing tropes. In a 2011 article for her university Palestine society, she wrote: “The University of Birmingham is something of a Zionist outpost in British higher education. It also has the largest JSoc in the country whose leadership is dominated by Zionist activists.”

During the election campaign, more than 50 heads of Jewish societies at universities across the country wrote an open letter to Bouattia asking her to clarify her position on antisemitism. In a detailed reply, Bouattia denied she had ever had issues with Jewish societies on campus. “I celebrate the ability of people and students of all backgrounds to get together and express their backgrounds and faith openly and positively, and will continue to do so,” she wrote.



Her supporters praised her activist credentials. “She is the most hardworking, dedicated and principled person I have ever met in my time as a sabb [sabbatical officer],” said Ali Milani, president of the University of Brunel student union.



But it is her politics that most obviously appeals at a time when student funding is under pressure. Mahamid Ahmed, the postgraduate taught rep on the NUS NEC, said he felt the union needed “a president who fights government policies and their attacks on students properly, and not just through rhetoric”.

One of her most popular manifesto pledges, echoed by many other candidates, is to campaign to repeal the Counter-Terror and Security Act, which makes referring students to Prevent, the government’s anti-extremism programme, a statutory duty.

The programme is unpopular among students, and more than 20 universities have held “Students Not Suspects” rallies. Bouattia gave evidence at a UN panel meeting in March, saying the programme was “damaging both academic freedom and student-lecturer relations by imposing a climate of fear and suspicion, particularly amongst Muslim students and staff who are disproportionally targeted”.

However, the debate about her anti-Zionist views is not going away. Just days before the NUS conference in Brighton, the student newspaper the Tab published a previously deleted video of Bouattia giving a speech in 2014 where she said “with mainstream Zionist-led media outlets … resistance is presented as an act of terrorism”.



Critics have pointed out the phrasing echoes the old antisemitic trope that Jews control the media, though it is not an uncommon view heard in the Palestinian solidarity circles, where the mainstream media is alleged to take a pro-Israel slant.

“It’s an ideology that parts of the British press actively support, and that is what I criticised,” Bouattia told the Guardian, but admitted she was trying to think more carefully about how her words could be interpreted. “I am always learning, and strive to always ensure that my language reflects my beliefs.”

Bouattia herself has often taken issue with misleading language choices. In September 2014, two weeks after the murder of aid worker Alan Henning by Islamic State, students were asked to vote on a motion condemning the group’s actions and expressing solidarity with the Kurdish forces fighting against it, “while expressing no confidence or trust in the US military intervention”.

Bouattia, as NUS black students’ officer, spoke passionately against the wording of the motion, which failed to pass, though she expressed solidarity with Kurdish efforts against Isis and condemned the group’s “brutal actions”. “We recognise that condemnation of Isis appears to have become a justification for war and blatant Islamophobia,” she said at the time. “This rhetoric exacerbates the issue at hand and in essence is a further attack on those we aim to defend.”

Daniel Cooper, the student who proposed the original motion, said he could not understand the objection, writing a blog where he decried “a stranglehold of ‘identity politics’ on the student movement”.

Another near-identical motion was passed, but Bouattia found her comments splashed across rightwing media, under headlines that alleged “the NUS had voted not to condemn Isis”.

In her conference speech, Bouattia denied she was the person depicted in media reports. “I know many of you will have seen my name dragged through the mud by rightwing media, and might think I am a terrorist and my politics driven by hate,” she said. “How wrong that is. I know too well the price of terrorism, the consequences of violence and oppression. I saw a country ripped apart by terror and was forced into exile.”

Raised in Constantine, Bouattia fled at the age of seven with her family during the bloodshed of the Algerian civil war. “My dad was almost killed when a bomb was planted in his lecture theatre,” she said in her election speech. “One week earlier, I sat petrified under my primary school desk as terrorists rained gunfire on our teachers.”

It is a backstory she frequently relates in her speeches; she says she arrived in the UK not speaking a word of English. “It was tough, but it taught me nothing’s impossible.”

Despite the reams of negative publicity in the mainstream media, it is undeniable that Bouattia has nerves of steel and deep conviction to stand as president in the face of such virulent criticism and online abuse, often racist and sexualised, and that student activists love her for that determination.

Bouattia herself has said the backlash against her vilification in the rightwing press boosted her campaign, giving a nod in a speech to her “Daily Mail groupies [who] mobilised many”to support her.



NUS politics has more often than not reflected the direction of travel of the left in general, though naturally left of the centre of gravity. Now there has been a cultural shift in the British left, led by the popularity of veteran activist Jeremy Corbyn, Bouattia may come to symbolise yet another symptom of the growing distrust of leaders who play the political game, in favour of those who take their fight on to the streets.

