In first interview since failure of re-election bid, student leader says her time in office has taken its toll

The outgoing president of the National Union of Students, Malia Bouattia, has described her turbulent year in office as the most difficult of her life and said it landed her in hospital on multiple occasions with stress-related illness.

In an often tearful interview, Bouattia, 29, who was defeated last week after standing for re-election, said she had had to seek hospital treatment at least five times for stress and had been taking medication for a stomach ulcer.

She defended her record as president and said she was proud to have been the first black woman and first Muslim to be elected to the post, but admitted her year in office had taken its toll, with repeated Islamophobic attacks, accusations of antisemitism and hate-filled trolling on social media.

She has suffered from migraines and physical exhaustion and said she felt in a state of breakdown at times. “It was the most difficult year of my life,” she said in her first interview since her defeat. “My god, I’ve lived through a civil war. But this was incredibly difficult.”

The reference to civil war goes back to her childhood in the Algerian city of Constantine, where she witnessed a shootout between police and terrorists at her primary school. Her parents, both academics, fled to the UK to find safety when Bouattia was seven. They have been horrified to see their daughter’s experiences as NUS leader.

“For them it was contradictory. I think they were incredibly proud, but they were just taken aback,” she said. “From the second the announcement was made, journalists were at their door.

“I remember my mum was just screaming: ‘This country prides itself on democracy. My daughter followed your democratic process and won, so how can you not accept it?’ She was just frantically asking ‘why?’.

“They didn’t realise to what extent there would be such a reception. It just scared them. They thought: ‘We fled for safety and now our daughter is in the heart of one of the biggest attacks.’ It was just really, really difficult for them.”

Bouattia was slightly less surprised by the strength of hostility she faced. She had previously served for two years as the NUS’s black students’ officer, during which she was branded a terrorist sympathiser after rejecting a motion condemning Isis. Her objection, she has since clarified, was to the wording of the motion rather than its intent, but death threats followed nevertheless.

“I knew it would come at a cost,” said Bouattia, whose term in office finishes at the end of June when the new president, Shakira Martin – the union’s current vice-president for further education – takes over. “It was never ever going to be easy, being the first is never going to be easy.”

Flanked by two NUS supporters throughout the interview, Bouattia appeared at times fragile, but her political drive was undiminished. “My body would physically express whatever I was going through by just folding – by deciding it was not going to move. But the best way I deal with things is to just keep going. There’s so much happening constantly, the best thing I know how to do is to just keep fighting.”

Her election as president, she said, coincided with a period when Islamophobia had become normalised and she was an obvious target. “In many ways I think there was just a total dehumanisation. We expected it, but you never know to what extent until you are living through it and experiencing it. It was incredibly difficult.

“I ended up in hospital quite a few times, particularly when things hit the media and trolls came out and found you on social media, and harassment on the streets – people recognising me.



“These aren’t students. These are random people who had seen me on the news and took out whatever frustrations they had on me without understanding the context whatsoever. It was incredibly Islamophobic … endless, endless emails filled with hate.

“People wanted to make it very clear that despite me having abided by every political process, they could not accept that I had won and I was national president and that I was surviving it, irrespective of everything that was being thrown my way.”

Bouttia does not regret her time as president and remains defiantly proud of having won the presidency, of having survived the conflict and abuse and of managing to stand a second time, though she was ultimately unsuccessful.

She said she was most proud of the work she did on racism and inclusion. But whatever her achievements, her presidency will be remembered as divisive: following her election there were votes to disaffiliate with the NUS in 26 student unions, with three voting to leave.

Her term in office has been dogged by allegations of antisemitism after she described Birmingham University as a “Zionist outpost” in 2011 and three years later criticised “mainstream Zionist-led media outlets”.



In the interview, Bouattia once again denied being antisemitic and said she had implemented the most extensive policy on tackling antisemitism in the history of the NUS. She said she regretted what she had said years earlier and had apologised, but she remained a problematic figure for many Jewish students.

Asked why she thought she had lost her second election, she said: “A year of fighting for my right to the role alone did not necessarily help and make it an easy year. A lot of my energies were spent dealing with endless attacks.”

Of Martin, the successful candidate who pitched herself as a centrist and a pragmatist who would heal the wounds of a fractured NUS, Bouattia said: “I did not disagree with anything she said. People decided on the candidate they wanted, but I don’t see our politics as so far removed. It will be very exciting for people.”

Bouattia plans to devote the final weeks of her presidency to campaigning in the general election. At some point, she will return to her postgraduate studies on post-colonial theory and language at Birmingham University and she intends to pursue her political passions on a local – not party – level, campaigning against the government’s Prevent agenda and fighting deportations. She is also engaged to be married.

Reflecting on the year behind her, she concluded: “I often say to people it’s been a rollercoaster, but more than that, it’s been empowering for many of us to know that someone from my background, someone that holds the political views that many do on the ground, can stand and serve as national president.”

Asked whether it had been worth it, she said: “It has, 100% worth it.”

