When Friedrich Merz realizes that his plan to introduce a quota for women in the CDU could get tight, he tries to limit the damage a little just in case. In his final statement before the vote, he called the proposed intervention in the party statutes “minimally invasive”. The quota is “by far” not the most important topic at this CDU party conference. One can only ask: Why so modest?
The introduction of a mandatory women’s quota is a turning point for this party. Merz, of all people, the former superhero of the conservative hardliners, has achieved something that all of his predecessors either never managed to achieve or didn’t even want to achieve. He had something that should be a matter of course in an ideal world enshrined in the regulations of the CDU: women and men have equal rights and therefore have equal shares in the board positions of this people’s party. That quote is right and it’s overdue. It hasn’t worked in all the decades of self-commitments and target regulations, so it has to work now with a little more pressure.
The very special world of the CDU in Germany has so far been anything but ideal in this regard. There is not a single federal state with a woman at the head of the party. There is no longer a female CDU prime minister. And at the base, the men are even more among themselves. Just twelve percent of the CDU district associations are led by women. At this point, however, one does not have to assume that Friedrich Merz had any radical emancipatory impulses. He knows the polls and studies the voter potential calculations. He simply realized that an incorrigible men’s club like this cannot win elections in the long run.
It is now debatable whether a quota is the best way to make the CDU more attractive to women. There was even a heated argument about it at the party conference in Hanover on Friday evening. Both sides made understandable points in the matter, but the quota opponents and especially the quota opponents presented their arguments much more convincingly. One can say: If the CDU treasurer Julia Klöckner and Schleswig-Holstein’s Prime Minister Daniel Günther had not courageously intervened in the discussion at the end and turned the mood in the hall, the vote would have turned out differently. For Friedrich Merz it would have been the first serious defeat as party chairman. But the entire CDU would have lost.
The staggered quota system, which has now been decided by the party congress, is initially just a paragraph in a statute that, with good reason, only gourmets will read through. These lines do not have an immediate external effect, but they can develop one at some point. The CDU Germany expresses a goal with it. She shows that she is at least willing to change. That she no longer wants to be a party in which the old men’s unions negotiate the essentials among themselves – and women are welcome to join when it suits them. One or the other voter might also notice something of this change of heart.
Regardless of the fact that similar regulations have long since proven themselves in parts of the political competition: what kind of signal would that have been if the CDU had voted against the women’s quota in 2022?