Attack of the 50 Ft. Women: How Gender Equality Can Save The World!. Catherine Mayer
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a grand coalition. She was not only the first woman to occupy the Chancellery, but the first leader of reunited Germany raised behind the Iron Curtain. As TIME scrambled late at night to produce a cover story, international editor Michael Elliott composed a headline that almost went to print before we noticed its double meaning: ‘Not Many Like Her’.
There still aren’t many – if any – like her, and even after she won a fourth term you’d be forgiven for assuming that not many of her colleagues or compatriots like her either. Although her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Baviarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) remained the largest bloc, their combined vote share shrank significantly. The Social Democratic Party fared even worse, recording its lowest result of the postwar era. The BBC website trumpeted this outcome as a ‘disaster for Merkel’ while commentators queued up to blame her for the rise of the hard-right Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD), which broke through to become the third largest party nationally. Merkel was indeed culpable – in the same sense that Barack Obama is responsible for Donald Trump: progressive politics sometimes generate backlash. The AfD had originally started as a protest party campaigning against German commitments to bail out floundering Eurozone countries, but found fresh purpose on 4 September 2015, when Merkel responded to the press of refugees from Syria stranded in Hungary by opening the border and issuing a welcome. ‘Wir schaffen das’, she said: we will manage. At first most Germans agreed, but after more than a million refugees and migrants sought to make new lives in Germany, that consensus melted.
If there was a defining moment, it was the mass assaults on women in Cologne during the final hours of 2015. There is still little clarity about the nature of these attacks: to what extent they were planned and whether most perpetrators were, as initially reported, foreigners. The authorities have admitted they do not expect to identify the majority of those responsible. If they did, it would at least now be easier to bring them to justice. Until 2016, Germany’s antiquated laws on sexual assault put the burden on women to show they had physically resisted their attackers. These laws were finally revised and strengthened, also gaining a clause that classifies groping as a sex crime.
That did nothing to stop a narrative about Merkel gaining 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. 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, bore fruit. Her integration strategy ensured the migrants got German language lessons and fast-tracked work permits, enabling the country to start filling 1.1 million jobs left vacant by an ageing population. These successes, and the falling numbers of migrant arrivals, did nothing to quiet her critics, especially within the ranks of the CDU and CSU. They had never really accepted her; now, they treated her as a liability. Days after the 2017 election, Alexander Mitsch, the leader of a new rightwing grouping within the CDU/CSU, called for Merkel’s resignation. ‘It’s important for there to be new momentum,’ he said. When Merkel’s efforts to form a coalition with two smaller parties foundered, she again got the blame, even though one of the smaller parties walked away. ‘Merkel has no power and no authority,’ opined Die Welt. Yet her international popularity remains largely intact. Women across the world chuckled when Donald Trump refused to shake her hand at their first White House meeting and celebrated her return to power. Ayesha Hazarika, a former Labour party adviser and stand-up comedian, spoke for many when she praised Merkel to a BBC audience: ‘In a world full of demented men like Kim Jong-un, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin – these crazy man-babies – I’m very glad that Angela Merkel is there. In terms of global leadership, she is a moral authority in a very scary world right now.’
Hazarika was by no means the only left-leaning woman happy to see Merkel back in Chancellery and to hope she finds a way to survive there. Yet in many parts of the world, female voters are more likely than men to vote for left-of-centre parties. This pattern is true in 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 has persuaded female voters in Germany to buck this trend by appealing across party lines to Social Democrats – and to women. At the 2013 election, 44 per cent of all female voters backed Merkel’s party, compared to 24 per cent for the Social Democrats. In 2017, she lost a chunk of that support but retained some residual goodwill by 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 has been perfect. Like many female leaders, her instinct is 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. 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 first electoral victory 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 two other female leaders in Europe, Norway’s Erna