From job rejections to City Hall: How Vera Çelik became Zurich’s first hijab-wearing councillor

ZURICH (MNTV) – When Vera Çelik finished her dental assistant training and sent out 150 job applications, she received 150 rejections. 

In around 40 of those cases, she was asked whether she would be willing to remove her headscarf to work. That experience, she later said, was the moment she decided to enter politics.

On Sunday 9 March — International Women’s Day — the 20-year-old Turkish-Swiss Social Democrat was elected to Zurich’s municipal council, becoming the first politician in the city to serve on that body while wearing a hijab. 

She secured 4,772 votes as a representative of the Social Democratic Party (SP) in Zurich’s 10th District. The result arrived on a day that felt, to many, entirely fitting.

“There could not have been a better gift on International Women’s Day,” said Turkiye’s ambassador to Switzerland, Şebnem İncesu, who called Çelik personally after the results were announced.

Born and raised in the northern districts of Zurich — Schwamendingen, Affoltern, Seebach — Çelik is the daughter of Turkish immigrants and grew up in the same neighbourhood she now represents in the city’s parliament. 

She is also, at 20 years old, the youngest member of the newly elected council.

Her path into public life was anything but smooth. After speaking at Switzerland’s federal youth parliament in late 2024, she began receiving hate mail — including death threats sent to her work email address — from anonymous online accounts. 

When she filed a police report, officers in Oerlikon told her they were uncertain whether the messages constituted racial discrimination, meaning prosecution would not proceed automatically. 

The harassment intensified after a high-profile incident in April 2025. Comedian Stefan Büsser, appearing on the SRF late-night programme, attempted a satirical joke that compared Çelik — because of her headscarf — to an Islamist terrorist alongside a young SVP politician dressed in a costume. 

Some 514 viewers filed complaints with the public broadcaster’s ombudsman, which subsequently ruled the segment discriminatory and a violation of human dignity. 

Çelik responded with an Instagram video that went viral, thrusting her into the national conversation and, as she wryly noted, turning her overnight into “the SP politician with the headscarf” — fielding letters from strangers demanding she take political responsibility, despite not yet holding any office.

Battling hate, pressing forward

Rather than retreating, she pressed forward. In the autumn of 2025 she submitted a municipal initiative calling for teachers and other public employees not to face discrimination for wearing religious symbols — including headscarves. 

She argued that outside authoritarian states, women compelled to wear the headscarf against their will represent a minority within a minority, and questioned why the garment was treated as a symbol of male control over women. 

She later withdrew the initiative, explaining she did not want to hand the SVP a platform to grandstand during the election campaign. 

The broader debate she had sparked, however, had already produced results: at a party congress, SP members voted to support teachers’ right to wear headscarves, reversing the party’s longstanding position — a shift Çelik had actively campaigned for, arguing it was inconsistent to accept cleaning staff wearing headscarves while barring teachers from doing so.

Writing in the Swiss magazine Republik ahead of the election, Çelik framed her headscarf not as a political statement but as a personal one. 

“Without the headscarf, a part of Vera would be missing,” she wrote, while acknowledging the privilege of being able to choose. 

She argued that the obsession with the garment reflects wider power struggles over who gets to define what counts as modern, liberated, or civilised — and that genuine emancipation means women deciding for themselves.

Her agenda, she has been at pains to point out, extends well beyond religious symbolism. 

She has submitted motions on improving conditions for apprentices, proposed a subsidised veterinary clinic for social welfare recipients, and placed anti-racism work at the top of her political priorities.

She joined the Young Socialists (Juso) in 2022 and was elected to the executive board of SP Migrants Switzerland in 2025. Her election has been celebrated across Switzerland’s Turkish community, and her father, Ömür Çelik — a journalist and publisher of the Turkish-language Post newspaper — received a personal congratulatory message from the Turkish ambassador alongside his daughter.

For the SP’s district co-chair Jan Suter, Çelik’s candidacy opened a door for people who had previously had no foothold in local politics. 

Young people with migrant backgrounds, long underrepresented in Swiss political institutions, finally had someone they could see themselves in, he said.