CUSU Women’s Officer Audrey Sebatindira has been announced as CUSU’s final representative at this year’s National Union of Students (NUS) National Conference after winning a by-election to the position.

Sebatindira, who took 59 per cent of the vote, was declared the winner of the by-election in a statement posted online by the CUSU Elections Committee shortly after voting closed at 7pm on Thursday.

Sebatindira emphasised her knowledge and experience of the NUS and Higher Education sector throughout the campaign. She pledged to support policies which tackled “sexual harassment, decolonising curricula, and making the NUS more transparent and representative,” as well as “the government’s racist Prevent policy.”

Ultimately, she had to fight off competition from only one other candidate, Dani Jacobson, a second-year Modern and Medieval Languages student, who polled 33 per cent of the vote. Her campaign proposed a three-point manifesto: “tackling discrimination on campus,” “a more accessible NUS,” and “supporting volunteering initiatives.”

A third candidate in the election, Nailya Shamgunova, announced her withdrawal from the race on Tuesday, but nevertheless received sixteen votes.

Cambridge's NUS delegates announced

The conference, which will take place in April, is a key event in the NUS and student politics calendar. It will debate a variety of issues under five key policy categories: Further Education, Higher Education, Society and Citizenship, Welfare, and Union Development. It will also elect the organisation’s new leadership.

This year’s conference is likely to be contentious, following a number of controversies surrounding the leadership of incumbent President Malia Bouattia, and opposition to it.
Sebatindira will join a delegation comprising CUSU President Amatey Doku, who attends by default, and the four other delegates chosen in November’s election: Jonty Leibowitz, Roberta Huldisch, Joshua Jackson, and Eireann Attridge.

The election this week was triggered when, in November’s original election, only two female candidates stood. The NUS’s ‘Fair Representation on NUS Conference’ rule requires at least half of any delegation to be either self-identifying women or non-binary people, and as a result a by-election had to be held to find a third female or non-binary candidate to join Attridge and Huldisch.