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MIGRANT ADVISORY COUNCIL GRAZ
Austria’s second city gives migrants a platform to be heard. But are they interested?
By The Immigrant Times
Graz Mayor Elke Kahr and Irina Karamarković, Chair of the city’s Migrant Advisory Council (Migrantenbeirat)
August 2026: Graz, Austria's second city, went to the polls on 28 June 2026, delivering results that are unique in a largely conservative country. First, Elke Kahr, the city’s Communist mayor, was re-elected with a larger majority; second, at the same time, non-EU immigrants elected an advisory council.
In the Gemeinderat (municipal) election, Mayor Elke Kahr's Communist Party (KPÖ) increased its lead in a traditionally conservative state, securing nearly 36 per cent of the vote, an increase of seven percentage points from 2021, and maintaining the largest share of any party in the 48-seat council.
In a parallel ballot open only to non-EU nationals, Graz also elected its Migrantenbeirat, an advisory council representing immigrants who have no vote in Austrian elections proper.
Elke Kahr has governed since November 2021 in coalition with the Greens and the Social Democrats (SPÖ), and has consistently framed immigration in social rather than security terms, arguing that affordable housing, her signature policy area, does more to ease tensions between immigrant and long-settled residents than any other single measure.
The Mayor’s administration co-hosts the city's annual conference of immigrant organisations (Konferenz der Migrantenvereine), alongside the leadership of the Migrantenbeirat. In January 2025, the Graz city council (Gemeinderat) passed a ten-point action programme against racism and discrimination, which was welcomed as a rare instance of advocacy translating into binding city policy.
The Migrantenbeirat (Migrant Advisory Council)
The Migrantenbeirat was established in 1995 when the Graz Gemeinderat voted to create what was then called the Ausländerbeirat (Foreigners' Council), the first body of its kind in Austria. It has been elected by direct, secret ballot of the city's non-EU residents from the outset, although it was not until the 2003 municipal election that its own poll was synchronised with the Gemeinderat vote. Previous elections had taken place on a different schedule. The council now comprises nine members serving five-year terms, chaired by Irina Karamarković.
In a 2023 interview, Karamarković said society must act collectively to prevent a social structure with distinct classes of citizens. She lamented politicians who appeared to listen sympathetically but did not follow up with meaningful actions. She warned and predicted that far-right tendencies within the EU were actively working to make legislation even stricter and more inhumane for third-country nationals.
Graz's non-EU population
Graz has a population of 308,000 residents, of whom 70 per cent hold Austrian citizenship. About 14 per cent (43,718) are EU citizens, and 16 per cent (48,418) are non-EU nationals. The pool from which the Migrantenbeirat's roughly 40,000 eligible voters are drawn is based on age and residency thresholds.
A broader measure used by the city, counting anyone with a migration background regardless of current citizenship, estimates the figure at over 90,000 people from around 180 countries of origin, according to the ‘Bericht zur Lage der Migranten in Graz’, a report published in February 2025.
By nationality, Bosnia and Herzegovina is the largest non-EU group in the city (8,065 residents), followed by Turkey (6,105), Ukraine (4,822), Syria (3,958), Afghanistan (3,516), Russia (3,032), Serbia (1,967), Kosovo (1,894), China (1,280) and Iran (1,215), a mix reflecting Austria's postwar Yugoslav and Turkish ‘guest worker’ recruitment, more recent refugee movements from Syria and Afghanistan, and arrivals from Ukraine and Russia since 2022.
The 2025 report showed that most respondents with a migration background had settled in Graz, started families, built careers, paid taxes, and generally felt satisfied with life in the city. Recognition of foreign qualifications and degrees continued to be a significant barrier to matching skills with employment, the report noted. Nearly three-quarters of respondents reported experiencing some form of discrimination, a point Mayor Kahr addressed directly at the report's launch, saying that equal treatment ‘regardless of where a person comes from’ was a mandate for the city government, not an ideal.
The Migrantenbeirat’s limited role and influence
The Migrantenbeirat's role is advisory rather than decision-making: it represents immigrants' interests to city politics and administration, briefs committees, issues public statements, and runs integration and civic participation projects, including the EU-funded EMV-LII initiative and an online participation platform, graz-gemeinsam-gestalten. Through this platform, non-EU residents can submit proposals directly to city authorities. It holds no vote or veto over Gemeinderat (city council) decisions and has no independent budget beyond modest campaign support for candidate lists.
That structural limitation has drawn criticism from within the council's own ranks in the past. A 2007 profile of the body's then-chair, Emmanuel Kamdem, quoted him describing a council that ‘exists, but has no teeth’, after his annual budget was halved to €17,200, even as the city's own, non-elected integration office was given more funding.
A refugee-support NGO representative interviewed went further, calling the council a dead end precisely because it sits outside the city's actual decision-making bodies. The criticism has not disappeared entirely, though the tone from City Hall has shifted: at the council's 30th-anniversary press conference in 2025, Mayor Kahr and the migrant council’s current chair, Irina Karamarković, jointly described it as a ‘best-practice model’ for immigrant political participation, pointing to sustained advocacy on naturalisation, qualification recognition and anti-discrimination policy as evidence of its influence, even without a formal vote.
Graz's elected model has no direct equivalent elsewhere in Austria. Linz's Migrations- und Integrationsbeirat (migration and integration council) is composed of appointed members, including one delegate from each party on the city council, plus nominees from migrant associations, rather than being chosen by immigrants themselves. Vienna has no citywide migrant advisory body at all: a 2020 civil-society petition to the city explicitly cited Graz and Linz as the models Vienna lacked, calling for the introduction of an elected council with a specific veto right over migration policy, reflecting frustration that a city where nearly half the population has a migration background has no directly elected forum for that constituency.
Extremely low voter turnout undermines the Beirat’s plea to be heard
Participation in the Migrantenbeirat election has rarely been high. Turnout in the council's inaugural election in 1995 was, according to the council's own records, its lowest ever, even lower than the 4.45 per cent recorded in 2021, which was among the weakest results since. This year's 5.07 per cent turnout, from a pool of over 40,000 eligible voters (up from 29,588 in 2021), resulted in 2,034 ballots being cast, a record in absolute numbers, though the council's own post-election statement admitted the outcome ‘remains behind our expectations’.
The migrant council attributed the low turnout to four factors: insufficient political education reaching eligible voters before the poll; ongoing stigmatisation of the terms "migrant" and "migrantin" in political and media discourse, which it said discourages identification with the process; the council's own limited institutional influence, meaning many voters may see a ballot for a body without binding powers as less impactful than a vote for the Gemeinderat (city council) itself; and a wider decline in political participation, especially among younger voters, observed across many democracies.
This year's campaign introduced two changes aimed at increasing turnout. For the first time, Migrantenbeirat voters could cast their ballots at the same polling stations used for municipal and district elections, instead of separate locations. The council also credited the NGO Südwind Graz, several political parties, and community ‘multipliers’ with door-to-door mobilisation efforts, including a Radio Helsinki programme in which candidates from six of the nine lists explained their reasons for standing. However, neither measure increased turnout by more than a percentage point.
A 2021 review of elected migrant advisory councils, commissioned by the European Coalition of Cities against Racism, highlighted a fundamental problem: a body with only advisory powers risks disappointing the expectations of the electorate it was created to represent, as it cannot intervene in individual cases or bypass the bureaucratic barriers faced by immigrants.
The question of whether a more explicitly political migrant council, one that publicly takes positions on contentious issues rather than just focusing on representation and service coordination, is the solution has arisen periodically since Kamdem's tenure without resulting in any change to the body's remit. Currently, most candidate lists still organise along community or diaspora lines rather than around competing political programmes, a structure that widens representation but limits its ability to act as a unified lobby on any one issue.
The June 2026 Migrantenbeirat election results
Nine lists contested the election, up from seven in 2021. Six groups won seats:
Stimmen ohne Grenzen (SOG, Voices Without Borders): 3 seats. The largest list by a significant margin, with more than twice its nearest competitor's vote share. SOG describes itself as an international list dedicated to immigrants' concerns and promoting good coexistence in Graz.
Internationale Liste für soziale Gerechtigkeit (ILSG, International List for Social Justice): 2 seats.
Afrikanische Liste für die Rechte der Migranten (ALRM, African List for Migrants' Rights): 1 seat.
Bildung, Respekt & Chancen (BRC, Education, Respect & Opportunities): 1 seat. BRC advocates for educational equity, mutual respect, and fair opportunities for everyone living in Graz, regardless of background.
Demokratische Liste der Kurden (DLK. Democratic List of Kurds): 1 seat.
Für eine gute Zukunft (FGZ, For a Good Future): 1 seat.
Sources and methodology
This article relies on official material published by the City of Graz on graz.at, including the Migrantenbeirat's own presentation of its structure and mandate, the certified 2026 and 2021 election results, the council's 30 June 2026 statement on turnout, the city's residency statistics by nationality (as of 1 January 2026), and the "Bericht zur Lage der Migranten in Graz" (2025). Historical critique of the council's powers is derived from a 2007 profile in Falter. Comparative information on Linz's Migrations- und Integrationsbeirat is sourced from the City of Linz; General commentary on the structural limits of elected migrant advisory councils is drawn from a toolkit published by the European Coalition of Cities Against Racism. Irina Karamarković was interviewed by ‘Empowering Immigrant Voices’ in December 2023. Please email the Editor for the full list of sources used.
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