The Greens failed in the state parliament on Thursday with their attempt to have parity in parliament by law. CSU, Free Voters, AfD and FDP voted against, the SPD abstained. With the exception of the Greens, all parliamentary groups rated the draft law as unconstitutional or legally problematic. It is “desirable that more women get involved in politics,” said Interior Secretary Sandro Kirchner (CSU). But the Green draft is “the completely wrong way”.
In an emotional debate, the Greens argued that the Basic Law expressly calls on the state to eliminate injustices between men and women. Instead, she experiences “a CSU that doesn’t want to do anything” and relies on “male supremacy,” said Eva Lettenbauer (Greens).
The Greens’ plan provides for the number of constituencies in the state election to be halved to around 44 and for this to be done directly by two people in the future. Each party should therefore set up a duo, and the voters received two first votes. The man with the most votes and the woman with the most votes would get into the state parliament. The result was that a duo from different parties represented a constituency.
In addition, list mandates should be allocated equally, i.e. the second votes. The parties would not have to draw up lists that are alternately filled with women and men, but the list mandates would have been distributed alternately to the candidates with the most votes after the election. So there would be a track for men and one for women.
Only one in four mandates is held by a woman
At the beginning of the debate, Green Party leader Katharina Schulze declared the vote to be an “oath” “for an equal Bavaria”. She pointed out that just over every fourth seat in the state parliament belongs to a woman. According to Schulze, Bavaria currently has the lowest quota of all German state parliaments. You have “not in the mood” to wait any longer for parity. “Half of society are women, so they also have half of the power,” said Schulze, defending her parliamentary group’s draft law, which Christoph Maier (AfD) called a “compulsory quota.” “Voluntariness alone is not enough,” said Schulze.
Ruth Müller (SPD) said the same thing. Only the SPD and the Greens make up their lists on a strictly equal basis. In the fact that the other parties do not do this, Müller sees the main reason for the low proportion of women in parliament. “We can’t be satisfied with that,” she said. Müller referred to the parity laws in Thuringia and Brandenburg, which had been overturned by the respective state constitutional courts. However, Müller called the Greens’ draft law a “necessary contribution to the debate” despite her faction’s abstention.
However, there was hardly any real debate on Thursday. After the CSU MP Petra Guttenberger had accused the Greens of wanting to “expand gender to the only important and decisive criterion here for ideological reasons”, her party colleague Benjamin Miskowitsch spoke of the “green Takatukaland”. After AfD man Maier accused the Greens of “sexism”, Alexander Hold (free voters) saw the danger in the draft of the so-called half-power law that a man could become a “second-class person”. He described the Greens’ advance as “campaign roar”.
The Greens MP Lettenbauer meanwhile pointed to a legal opinion by Silke Laskowski, professor of public law, international law and European law at the University of Kassel and member of the electoral law commission of the Bundestag, which had come to the conclusion that the draft would withstand a constitutional review. Her argument: since the law has a constitutionally legitimized goal, namely equal rights for women and men, the achievement of the goal cannot be unconstitutional.
FDP parliamentary group leader Martin Hagen accused the Greens of interfering with the electoral law in such a way that “the voters would no longer decide on the composition,” but politicians. According to Hagen’s logic, women in Bavaria already have “half the power,” and even a little more, because slightly more women than men live in Bavaria — and thus more voters than voters who decide on the composition of parliament.