ULU election results suggest victory for “activist” candidates

The University of London Union (ULU) election results have been announced, with the candidates running on strong political, anti-cuts manifestos coming out on top.

Current ULU vice-president Sean Rillo Raczka was elected as President; current Royal Holloway Students’ Union president Daniel Lemberger Cooper was elected to the post of Vice-President; and LSE postgraduate student Jen Izaakson was elected as the new London Student Editor.

Alongside these three Sabbatical Officer positions, Craig Gent and Stef Newton were elected to the ULU Board of Trustees.

Sean Rillo Raczka ran uncontested and won 737 of the 1234 votes.

Daniel Cooper defeated Ross Speer by 871 votes to 560 in the second round, after Abs Hassanli had been eliminated in the first round with 217 votes. There were a total of 1591 votes in the category.

The London Student Editor category was the most closely contested. There were five candidates running with Jen Izaakson triumphing after four rounds of eliminations. Izaakson had led from the first round and eventually beat UCL Cheese Grater editor John Bell in the final round by 637 votes to 572.

Reflecting on the result, a gracious John Bell said: “Congratulations to Jen, she had the ULU demographic on her side, but ran a good, high energy campaign. I wish her all the best.”

Whilst Rillo Raczka was running uncontested for the presidency, he faced a potentially difficult challenge in overcoming a Re-Open Nominations ‘candidate’ buoyed by voter disillusionment and a support campaign by King’s College London Students’ Union newspaper Roar!

Roar! ran a message on its website saying: “We have decided to put the full weight of Roar!’s support behind reopening nominations for ULU President.

“We just can’t support an election where there is only one person running for President .”

Responding to the ‘Back RON’ campaign, Rillo Raczka said: “Roar! thought it was fair to do a RON campaign against the only presidential candidate; they didn’t contact me or ask me for any comment on that.

“People want to vote RON against people who succeed in things. If I was under the radar and wasn’t doing anything that was interesting or controversial, I wouldn’t have got that many RONs. I’m very relaxed about the idea of people doing RON campaigns and things like that.

“I think it is also dissatisfaction with ULU from colleges who are paying a lot of money and we need to work to rectify that.”

All of the elected candidates define themselves as activists and have pledged to continue ULU’s campaigning work.

They are also all members of left-wing organisations: Sean Rillo Raczka and Stef Newton are from Counterfire; Daniel Cooper is a member of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty; Jen Izaakson is a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party; and Craig Gent is a member of the Anarchist Federation.

All candidates will officially take up their new posts on August 1.

A full breakdown of the election results is available here.