Mass assaults on women in Cologne during the final hours of 2015 tested German hospitality. There is still little clarity about the nature of these attacks: to what extent these were planned and whether most perpetrators were, as initially reported, foreigners. The authorities continue to pursue prosecutions but have admitted they do not expect to identify the majority of those responsible. If they did, bringing them to justice would be difficult. Germany’s antiquated laws on sexual assault put the burden on women to show they had physically resisted their attackers.
A narrative about Merkel gained traction inside the country and out: she was a busted flush. Germany’s first female Chancellor had broken Germany and, far from helping German womenfolk, had exposed them to danger.
Pretty much everything about that narrative was wrong, although Merkel did make one key miscalculation. Until the refugee crisis, the criticism routinely levelled against her was that she used her power too sparingly – that she had responded too slowly to the Eurozone crisis and with too much focus on German national interests at the expense of poorer countries such as Greece. She put a different gloss on her approach: she preferred to govern in ‘many small steps’, rather than big ones.14 This fitted with the legacy of her early life, in a police state where she learned to achieve without attracting attention. It was also pragmatic: the German voting system creates coalitions rather than outright majorities, and deploys multiple checks and balances. German history warns against unfettered power. Even so, Merkel confronted the migrant crisis as Europe’s strongest leader, the only one with political capital. In finally spending that capital, she sought to instill in other European leaders a sense of collective responsibility. This was, as she saw it, ‘a historic test of globalisation’.
Merkel alone rose to it. She had overestimated Europe’s capacity for solidarity. Her remarks at a press conference after her party’s poor showing in the September 2016 Berlin state elections, widely misreported as a mea culpa, instead restated her convictions. She did regret the phrase ‘we will manage’, which ‘makes many people feel provoked, though I meant it to be inspiring’.
However, she had followed a humanitarian imperative and a strategy that, despite flaws, had started to bear fruit. Signs of progress did nothing to quiet her critics, especially within the ranks of her Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). They had never really accepted her; now, with federal elections due in September 2017, they began to treat her as a liability. Her approval ratings did drop, from 67 per cent in September 2015 – an astonishingly lofty figure for a politician in her third term of office – but have risen again to only a few points shy of that level. Her popularity is international. When I posted the news on Twitter that she had decided to run for a fourth term, my timeline filled with ‘phews’ and ‘thank gods’ and ‘thank fuck: we need an adult’.
In Germany, female voters are more likely than men to vote for left-of-centre parties. This pattern repeats in many parts of the world, including the US, where the majority of white women who voted for Trump was not as large as the majority of white men who backed him. You can see why that might be. Conservatism is inherently disposed towards maintaining the status quo, and some groups of female voters know this is not to their benefit, not least because of the right’s fondness for downsizing the state at the potential costs of state-sector jobs that employ women and services that support women, plus a tolerance for a wide income spread in a system that relegates more women to the lower tiers. Merkel bucks this trend by appealing across party lines to Social Democrat voters – and to women. At the last election, 44 per cent of all female voters backed Merkel’s party, compared to 24 per cent for the Social Democrats.
She has done so in part by being a woman and showing what women can be in a country that until relatively recently in its dominant Western states envisaged only three spheres of female activity: Kinder, Küche, Kirche – children, kitchen, church. Up until 1958, a West German husband could demand his wife’s employer sack her if she neglected the housework. These attitudes were still reflected in the education system Merkel inherited, in which a majority of schools in the west ended at midday so pupils could return home for a cooked lunch. When Merkel first led the Christian Democrats into an election, opponents and colleagues alike asked ‘Kann die das?’ Is she able to do this? ‘With a negative touch,’ says Ursula von der Leyen, Germany’s first female Defence Minister. ‘Nobody is asking any more.’
This does not mean Merkel’s record on promoting gender equality is perfect. Like many female leaders, her instinct has been to shy away from gender politics. She was uncomfortable with her first portfolio in Helmut Kohl’s government, as Minister of Women and Youth. Germany’s sluggish birth rate rather than any feminist impulse prompted Merkel to introduce a wide range of measures to support working mothers, including the provision of parental leave paid up to 65 per cent of salaries for up to 14 months, guaranteed daycare for children aged one or above, and an expansion of all-day schools.15 She only reluctantly gave in to deploying quotas to increase female representation on the boards of large German companies. ‘It is pathetic that in more than 65 years of the Federal Republic of Germany, it was not possible for the Dax-30 companies to get a few more women on supervisory boards on a voluntary basis,’ she said. ‘But at some point there had been so many hollow promises that it was clear – this isn’t working.’
German society has witnessed significant changes. Female participation in the German labour force rose by two percentage points in the decade ahead of Merkel’s election and by eight points during her first ten years in government. It would be unwise to claim a direct correlation; many factors will have played a part. Nevertheless, there’s no denying that German women have risen under Germany’s first female leader.
Theresa May’s elevation prompted crowing in Tory ranks. The Conservatives had notched up a second female Prime Minister before Labour even managed a female party leader. May, Merkel and three other female leaders in Europe, Norway’s Erna Solberg, Serbia’s Ana Brnabić and Poland’s Beata Szydło (and Szydło’s immediate predecessor Ewa Kopacz) are all on the right. Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović belonged to the conservative Croatian Democratic Union party before her election as Croatia’s President. This does not mean rightwing politics promotes better outcomes for women, rather that parties of the left are especially bad at promoting women.
The paradoxical explanation for this phenomenon is that parties of the left have historically championed gender equality. This means they are often too convinced of their own virtue to recognise their failings. Those failings loosely group into two categories. The first is one of precedence. In their desire to solve all structural inequalities, these parties get caught up in unhelpful binaries of the kind that disfigured the Democratic primaries in 2008 – ethnic minorities or women, class or gender, pensioners or underprivileged youth – reflexively assigning the lowest priority to women even though most forms of disadvantage intersect with being female. Far-left activists aim not to fix parts of the system, but to change the whole system, again stranding women in an endless waiting game. They also mistake optics for action. Amnesty International’s 2015 report on Bolivia noted that the socialist government had set up a Gender Office and Unit for Depatriarchalisation and created a Deputy Minister for Equal Opportunities within the Ministry of Justice and Fundamental Rights, responsible for the advancement of women. However, none of these new institutions had been allocated the resources necessary to be effective. The Equal Opportunities brief, for example, received just 5.3 per cent of the ministerial budget.16 As the White Queen tells Alice, ‘The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today.’
The second category and reason for the ongoing failure to promote women sometimes still dares to speak its name in parties and organisations of the right: hostility towards women. In choosing to fight Conservative MP Philip Davies in the snap election, we highlighted a particularly flamboyant example of this. Davies joined Parliament’s cross-party