Migrant, lawyer, fighter: The many faces of Austria’s justice minister

Alma Zadic arrived in Vienna from Bosnia when she was 10. Now, she is the justice minister in an awkward coalition of liberal Greens and hardline anti-immigrant conservatives. Katrin Bennhold meets her

Being perceived as different makes people vulnerable, Zadic says. It makes them dependent on the impartiality of the rule of law (EPA-EFE)

Alma Zadic is nervous about standing too close to the row of large windows in her office. Since becoming Austria’s justice minister, the threats have been relentless. “A bullet is reserved for you,” read a recent one. Hours after being sworn in last month, Zadic was given police protection.

A daughter of Bosnian refugees and member of the progressive Green Party, Zadic went into politics three years ago with a clear goal: to fight an ascendant far right.

Now, she is charged with defending policies that were co-designed by the far right in previous years to effectively keep people like her parents out of the country.

That, in a nutshell, is the moral dilemma facing Austria’s liberal pro-refugee Greens in joining forces with the conservatives of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. The Greens have replaced the far-right Freedom Party as junior partners in government and get to put climate change on the political agenda. But they are also becoming complicit in Kurz’s hard-right immigration policy.

No one personifies this Faustian pact more starkly than Zadic, Austria’s first minister with a migrant background. (“A migrant foreground,” she corrects me. “It is the first thing about me that people see.”)

Call her Austria’s AOC: like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the superstar Democratic representative from New York City, Zadic is clever, winning, young and idealistic, and has a proudly hyphenated identity (“Bosnian-Austrian”).

Her story is in many ways a modern day fairy tale: a refugee girl excels at school, rises fast in her career, is elected to parliament and becomes a senior member of the cabinet at 35. But what has made Zadic a hero to many has turned her into a target for others.

“Now foreigners get ministerial posts. Austria’s Downfall,” scoffed one Twitter post.

“Why don’t we just put a terrorist in charge of Homeland Security?” another sneered.

The price of going into government was high, both personally and politically, Zadic admits. But the price of not going into government – of ceding the field to the far right again – would have been much higher, she insists.

“It makes a difference who is in government,” Zadic says.

Zadic knows this firsthand. She was a teenager in 2000, when the Freedom Party first joined a conservative government under the charismatic and antisemitic firebrand Jorg Haider. Other European capitals froze diplomatic ties with Vienna, while her parents, both engineers, feared they might be deported.

“I was still young, but I could feel it,” she recalls. “I know my parents worried and had concrete fears about what would happen to us.”

In her current capacity, as Zadic tells it, her mandate and that of her party is not only to promote a long overdue green agenda in this small Alpine nation but also to resist the currents of populism and safeguard fundamental rights.

How she walks that tightrope will in many ways be the story of this uneasy coalition, which is being watched closely in neighbouring countries, above all in Germany, where the next government will also almost certainly be a coalition of conservatives and Greens.

Critics warn that the Greens risk becoming a fig leaf for Kurz’s hard-right agenda. In the governing programme, a modest carbon tax on airplane tickets and subsidies for public transport sit side by side with a headscarf ban for girls up to 14, deportation centres and a controversial new form of “security detention” for asylum seekers, a measure Zadic once called “authoritarian” backsliding.

“You won’t get something like that in Germany,” Annalena Baerbock, co-leader of Germany’s Greens, commented tersely.

As for Zadic, even friends feel conflicted: “She has a mission impossible,” said Stephanie Krisper, a lawmaker from centrist party Neos.

For Zadic it is more complicated than that.

“In opposition we could have written the most beautiful idealistic proposals, and they would have gone nowhere,” she says.

Kurz won 37 per cent of the votes, the Greens only 14, she notes. Between the ballots cast for Kurz’s party and the Freedom Party, Austria still has a conservative majority.

“We will do our best,” she says.

A former competitive volleyball player and fitness coach, Zadic has heaps of stamina. In opposition she was one of the most dogged critics of Kurz and his far-right coalition partners. She attacked the far-right interior ministry for a raid on the country’s intelligence service. When other countries stopped sharing intelligence with Vienna for fear of leaks to Russia and far-right extremists, Zadic raised her concerns about “Austria’s security” in parliament.

A lawmaker from Kurz’s party heckled her at the time: “You are not in Bosnia!”

“He was trying to devalue what I was saying based on my origins,” Zadic recalls.

The heckling was frequent, and she learned to ignore it. But sometimes it hurt. In those brief moments, she would no longer feel like Dr Zadic, the accomplished politician, but Alma, the refugee. The other.

Zadic was born in Tuzla, an industrial town in the northeastern corner of Bosnia-Herzegovina that was the site of a notorious 1995 massacre during the Balkan wars. She was seven when the war broke out and 10 when her family fled to Vienna.

It was 1994, and she found herself the only non-Austrian in her class. She recalls the many moments of kindness her family experienced in Vienna. But there were the other moments, too. The humiliation she felt when a teacher ripped a math problem sheet from her hands, saying: “You can’t do that anyway.”

That day she says she understood something about how she was seen in her new home country. The message, she says, was: “You are different.”

These childhood experiences helped fuel a powerful drive that led her first to study law and, years later, to trade a lucrative legal career for public service. Being perceived as different makes people vulnerable, Zadic says. It makes them dependent on the impartiality of the rule of law.

She studied law in Vienna and went on to get a Fulbright scholarship for a postgraduate law degree at Columbia University in New York and, back in Vienna, a PhD in human rights law. She interned at the International Court of Justice in The Hague before becoming a successful lawyer at an international firm in Vienna.

Some of her resilience she owes to New York, where she says she made peace with her own identity.

“People were Italian and American, or Mexican and American and it was totally normal,” she says. “It was such a revelation.

“For years I had struggled with this question: ‘Am I Bosnian or Austrian?’ In New York I learned that I can be Austrian and Bosnian and European at the same time.”

Back in Austria, as a successful lawyer in an international firm, her background faded. But as soon as she decided to go into politics, in the summer of 2017, it came back with a vengeance.

One national newspaper headline from that year is still seared into her memory. “They called me a ‘refugee child,’ ” she says.

“I had been in Austria for 25 years, I was a lawyer, I had a PhD, I was neither a refugee nor a child, and I realised: This is what defines me still,” she says.

And not only on the far right.

After Zadic joined the government, her fellow Greens irked her by celebrating her as the country’s “first Muslim minister”.

“No one today asks: ‘Are you Protestant or Catholic?’” Zadic says. “In a secular state it should not matter at all what religion you have, if any, and where you were born as long as you are ready to work for your country.”

The constant assumption that she is Muslim exasperates Zadic, who says she is an atheist. Yes, there are Muslims in her extended family, she says, but there are Christians and Orthodox, too. Her parents and grandparents, who all grew up under communism in the former Yugoslavia, were never religious either, she says.

Zadic nevertheless knows she is a powerful role model for the country’s girls and boys of migrant background, many of them Muslim.

“When I was in school it was unthinkable that someone like me could become a minister,” she says.

Last month, when she visited her old school in an ethnically mixed district of Vienna, a group of children at the bus stop shouted “Alma! Alma!”

“I don’t want to let them down,” Zadic says. “I don’t want to let Austria down.”

© New York Times