.png)
5 hours ago
3
Six beaming election winners huddled around a table and not a woman among them: a viral social media image of the man likely to be Germany’s next chancellor and his transition team has revived longstanding questions about whether Friedrich Merz can bridge a persistent gender gap.
“Not great optics” was among the more generous of the thousands of comments on the post by Merz’s Bavarian ally Markus Söder, which seemed to hark back to another time.
“We’re ready for political change in Germany,” was Söder’s caption on X and Instagram for the shot from the all-male working breakfast in Berlin with Merz and his team, ranging in age from 47 to 69.
Söder had earlier welcomed the victory of the conservative CDU/CSU alliance in Sunday’s general election as an opportunity to “return to an old Germany … a Germany of normality”.
The picture attracted a slew of derision. “Get us a coffee, won’t you, sweetie?” went an imaginary caption. “Did you hide the women under the table?” asked an Instagram user. “Where are the women, in the kitchen?” asked another. “There are more doors than women in this picture,” observed a third.
The Greens co-leader Franziska Brantner remarked tartly: “The new Syrian government is probably more diverse than the Union’s negotiating team,” she told the news agency DPA. Her predecessor as party chief, Ricarda Lang, shared the picture, sarcastically echoing previous comments by Merz: “Quotas primarily hurt women themselves.”
Others asked why the CSU’s Dorothee Bär, one of the few women deemed likely to join Merz’s cabinet, had not been included after winning an absolute majority in her constituency, the strongest result in the country.
The CDU politician Lilli Fischer attempted to defend the party on X, saying the general secretary pictured “could have been a woman – if all the women asked hadn’t said no. That’s part of the truth too.”
Germans elected fewer women to the parliament as a whole this time, making up 32.4% of the new class of MPs – down from 35%.
The Greens will have the most female representation in their parliamentary group with 61%. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland has the least, about 12%, although it chose a woman, Alice Weidel, as its candidate for chancellor.
The CDU and CSU are in the middle at about 23% and 25% respectively. The CDU has produced two of the most powerful women in recent European history: Angela Merkel and the European Commission chief, Ursula von der Leyen.
But as Merz, 69, pledges a rightwards restoration to pull the party back from the centre after the Merkel years, many observers fear women will take a backseat in the process.
The outgoing chancellor, Olaf Scholz, put a premium on gender parity in his centre-left-led government, maintaining a near 50/50 balance until the coalition imploded in November.
His predecessor, Merkel, rejected quotas but steadily included more women in her cabinets during her 16 years in power. Her last cabinet had nine male ministers and eight women, including herself.
Merz, by contrast, has ruled out a gender-balanced cabinet. “We wouldn’t do women any favours with that,” he said last year, pointing to the “crass miscasting” of a female defence minister, Christine Lambrecht, who was forced to resign in January 2023, as a reason not to explicitly seek out women.
Nevertheless the CDU leader introduced a gender-parity quota in 2022 for his party’s executive board “to show the outside world that we take the issue seriously”.
Commentators have long asked whether Merz’s old-school image will prove to be a liability while leading a Germany riven by deep divisions. Does Merz, they wonder, have a Frauenproblem?
An Ipsos poll this month showed that only one in six women thought Merz had the qualities necessary to be chancellor. The figure was higher among men, at about one in five, reflecting the biggest gender divide among the candidates in the race.
Matthias Jung, a political analyst at the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen institute, called Merz “more of a liability than an asset” for his party in the run-up to the vote, noting an exodus of traditionally conservative older female voters from the party not seen since the 1980s.
Speaking to Der Spiegel magazine, he called it the “Merkel gap”, referring to the former chancellor’s appeal among educated, politically independent female voters over 45.
Analysts say Merz’s weak favourability ratings will prove a challenge after he turned in the CDU/CSU’s second-worst general election result since the second world war with 29%.
Exit polls showed 30% of men voted for Merz’s bloc compared with just 27% of women. The gender split was particularly stark among younger voters, who abandoned the traditional centrist parties for the fringes.
After losing a power struggle with Merkel in the early 2000s, Merz took a decade-long hiatus from politics in which he made a fortune in business. During the campaign, opponents picked up decisions he made long ago as an MP to attack him.
One of the most high-profile examples was a 1997 vote against making rape in marriage punishable by law. Merz said he had favoured a more limited, conservative-backed version of the bill and has said he would vote differently now.
Serap Güler, a CDU board member who has clashed with Merz on migration, admitted during the campaign that the party had been unsuccessful in “liberating” him from the “cliche” of being more retrograde than today’s mainstream.
But she called on Merz to take that perception into account when forming his new coalition government, most likely with the Social Democrats. “I would find it more than regrettable if out of 14 or 15 ministries only five were filled by women,” she told Zeit Online.
Merkel, who had been tight-lipped about her old rival during the campaign, congratulated Merz on his win by text message, wishing him “luck in forming his government”, a spokesperson said.
