VIENNA (MNTV) — The Austrian government said its ban on headscarves in schools was designed to protect young Muslim girls. The women and girls it claimed to be protecting said otherwise — by a margin of 93 to 5.
That was the central finding of a survey published by Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative, authored by researcher Farid Hafez, which polled 926 Muslim women in Austria within days of the government’s announcement that it intended to prohibit the hijab for pupils from first through eighth grade.
The legislation has since been passed by parliament and is set to take effect in the coming school year — but the survey’s findings remain a damning record of how completely the government’s framing was rejected by the community it claimed to be serving.
The findings
The numbers were remarkably consistent across the survey’s core questions. Asked directly whether they supported the ban, 93 per cent of respondents said no, with just 5 per cent in favour and 2 per cent expressing no opinion.
Among the respondents, 69 per cent wore the hijab themselves — meaning that even a clear majority of those who do not wear one rejected the proposed law.
The government framed the ban as an emancipatory measure, arguing that the headscarf prevents girls from developing freely and harms their educational prospects. The survey tested both claims directly.
When asked whether the hijab negatively affects the academic performance of girls under 14, 94 per cent disagreed. When asked whether it harms their professional development, 93 per cent rejected the proposition.
On the broader question of how respondents viewed the ban, 77 per cent described it as coercive, Islamophobic, and discriminatory. The remaining 23 per cent were willing to see it as potentially beneficial for education and career prospects — the one question on which views were somewhat more divided, though still decisively one-sided.
The political paradox
The survey also captured party preferences — making it, according to Hafez, the first large-scale poll in Austria to collect such data from Muslim women. The results revealed a striking contradiction.
The Social Democrats (SPÖ) were the most popular party among respondents, chosen by 30 per cent — despite being part of the very coalition that pushed the ban through parliament.
The two parties most vocally championing the legislation, the conservative ÖVP and the liberal NEOS, received just 1 per cent support each.
After the SPÖ, the next most favoured parties were two that do not even hold seats in the national parliament: SÖZ (Social Austria of the Future), a Vienna-based party led primarily by politicians of Turkish heritage, at 13 per cent, and the Communist Party (KPÖ), which holds the mayoralty in Graz and the vice-mayoralty in Salzburg, at 10 per cent. The Greens received 3 per cent and the far-right FPÖ just 1 per cent.
The 42 per cent of respondents who said they either do not vote or lack the right to do so points to a significant gap in political participation — one that Hafez argues requires both structural reform to expand voting access and greater civic mobilisation from Muslim communities, particularly in a country where national turnout typically exceeds 75 per cent.
A ban twice attempted, twice contested
Austria’s first attempt at a school headscarf ban, introduced in 2019 by a coalition of the ÖVP and the far-right FPÖ, was struck down by the Constitutional Court in 2020 on the grounds that it singled out Muslim girls and therefore violated the principle of equality.
The current government — a coalition of the ÖVP, SPÖ, and NEOS — broadened the age range to cover girls up to 14 and reframed the headscarf not as a religious garment but as an expression of “honour culture,” attempting to sidestep the constitutional objection by recategorising the practice as cultural rather than religious. The legislation was passed by parliament in late 2025, with families facing fines of up to €800 for repeated non-compliance.
The Islamic Religious Community in Austria (IGGÖ) has challenged the ban before the Constitutional Court, armed with a 21-page legal opinion by constitutional scholar Markus Vasek of Johannes Kepler University Linz, which concluded the law violates Austria’s constitutional requirement of religious and ideological neutrality.
Vasek argued that the legislation treats young Muslim girls who wear headscarves as a uniform group presumed to lack cognitive maturity — a characterisation he deemed legally untenable.
Whether the ban survives judicial review will depend on whether the government’s reframing of the headscarf as cultural rather than religious is sufficient to overcome the same equality objections that defeated the 2019 version.
The court’s track record gives the IGGÖ grounds for cautious optimism, though the government has insisted the current law was drafted to withstand constitutional scrutiny.
The discrimination Austria isn’t addressing
Hafez situates the survey within a broader context of documented discrimination. The EU Fundamental Rights Agency’s 2024 study found that Austria had the highest rate of anti-Muslim discrimination of any country surveyed — 71 per cent of Muslim respondents reported experiencing racial discrimination in the preceding five years. Women who wear religious clothing faced even sharper disadvantage, particularly in the job market. Only 6 per cent reported discrimination to authorities — reflecting a widespread belief that doing so would make no difference.
Austria has also failed to implement the EU Anti-Racism Action Plan’s call for national strategies against racism, including anti-Muslim racism. Official figures show an 88 per cent increase in recorded anti-Muslim acts in 2025.
The government’s response to this environment has not been to address the discrimination Muslim women face — it has been to ban what they wear.
Community that was never asked
The survey was designed as an explorative rather than fully representative study, with respondents reached through social media channels including Instagram and WhatsApp groups across various ethnic backgrounds. Hafez acknowledges its limitations but argues it fills a gap that the government itself never attempted to address: the law was developed without consulting the community it targets, without data on whether the hijab actually harms educational outcomes, and without any mechanism for hearing from the girls whose choices it overrides.
What the survey captured was a community that did not recognise itself in the government’s description of its own experience — women and girls being told they were oppressed by a garment that 94 per cent said had no negative impact on education, and being offered “freedom” through a law that 77 per cent called discriminatory.
The ban is now law. The constitutional challenge is pending. And the voices of the women it was supposedly designed to help remain, as they were when the legislation was drafted, largely unheard.