Gareth Lim elected Oxford Union President for Michaelmas 2026 in re-poll

Gareth Lim has been elected Oxford Union President for Michaelmas Term 2026 at a re-run of the election.

Lim received 299 first preference votes, by a margin of 80 votes over Liza Barkova, who received 219 first preferences. Hamza Hussain and Victor André Marroquín also contested the election, receiving 66 and 61 first preference votes respectively. Six hundred and forty-six valid votes were cast, well below the 1787 votes cast in the original poll, with Lim receiving a majority of 327 votes including second preferences. 

Speaking to Cherwell following his election, Lim said the victory shows that “the Union is able to unite around a non-political figure; that the union believes in something that’s much greater than politics”.  He thanked his “good friend” Katherine Yang, President for Hilary Term, among others, and described his supporters as a “very large coalition”. He said this election had “no slates”, meaning “people were far more able to vote [with] their conscience”. 

Gareth Lim first ran for President for Michaelmas Term 2026 at the end of Hilary Term, coming in 3rd place behind Catherine Xu and Liza Barkova. He acknowledged to Cherwell the difference between the two campaigns, his first as a “guerrilla campaign” and his second which “had the support of a lot more traditional political figures within the Union”, proving that people “can unite behind something brilliant”.

In a victory speech in the Union bar, Lim expressed his appreciation for the other candidates for their campaigns and those who backed his campaign. He told the assembled audience in the Union bar that “this victory belongs to all of us who voted for me”. He promised to “take back the Union” and change the “conduct” of the institution. 

During his campaign, Lim focused heavily on, what he described to Cherwell as, restoring “intellectual rigour”, arguing that recent terms had become dominated by controversy and internal disputes. He called for a broader range of debates and speakers, suggesting the Society should place greater emphasis on areas outside politics and international affairs.

Lim also raised concerns about the Union’s disciplinary culture, claiming that candidates had become “incentivised to use the Union disciplinary procedure as a replacement for campaigning”. He added that the Society had become “over-reliant” on disciplinary processes and criticised what he described as a wider “culture of fear” within Union politics.

The election took place in the context of ongoing backlash surrounding the Oxford Union’s invitation to several high-profile figures, including Carl Benjamin and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson. Speaking to Cherwell after his victory, Lim repeated that he would not have invited Yaxley-Lennon to the Society, but said the Union should “stand by [its] decisions” and said incumbent President Arwa Elrayess had “done a pretty good job” at deciding who she wanted to invite. He said Elrayess was considering changes to the debate format to “ensure that people like Tommy Robinson answer the questions” and that it will be “only after we see the debate” that we could judge whether the invitation to Yaxley-Lennon was “the right thing to do”.

The re-run election was triggered after President-Elect Catherine Xu was found guilty of electoral fraud by a Union Tribunal. The Tribunal concluded that Xu had orchestrated a scheme to impersonate legitimate voters during the original election, held in Hilary Term 2026, by distributing Oxford Union membership cards to individuals not entitled to vote and instructing them to cast ballots in other members’ names.