Two days after a coalition of conservatives won Germany’s federal election last month, the governor of Bavaria took to Instagram to say the parties were “ready for political change” and posted a group picture of the likely future chancellor, Friedrich Merz, with five other leaders.
But the photo seemed to suggest that a changed Germany will look remarkably like the country of old: It shows six white middle-aged white men sitting around a table of snacks. The only apparent concession to modern sensibilities was that half of the men are not wearing neckties.
Three-and-a-half years after Angela Merkel, the only woman to serve as chancellor, retired, German national politics seem to be backsliding when it comes to gender parity. The new German Parliament, which met for the first time on Tuesday, has always been more male and less diverse than the population it represents, but the new one will be even more male and — compared with the society as a whole — less diverse than the one before it.
Only 32 percent of the 630 new lawmakers are women, a drop from 35 percent when the last Parliament was formed in 2021.
In a country where society has appeared at times reluctant to turn away from traditional gender roles, the number of women in the highest elected body has been stagnating since 2013, when it hit a high of 36 percent. The president of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, pointed to this statistic during a speech at a recent Women’s Day celebration.
“When our democracy has a problem with women, then our country has a problem with democracy,” Mr. Steinmeier said. He noted that even if every elected woman from all of the country’s parties voted together as a bloc, they would not reach the one-third minority needed to block changes to the Constitution.
In his opening speech to Parliament, Gregor Gysi, the left-wing firebrand and honorary president of the inaugural session, made note of the decrease and pleaded to make Women’s Day a national holiday. “On this day, we men would always be reminded that we too have a duty to work toward equality for women,” he told lawmakers.
Germany’s political drift to the right, where parties tend to have fewer female lawmakers, is in part responsible for the erosion of women’s presence in the halls of power.
In the Parliament, or Bundestag, women make up only 12 percent of the hard-right Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD, while in Mr. Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union, they make up 23 percent, and in its Bavarian-only sister party, the Christian Social Union, they make up 25 percent. Among the center-left Social Democrats, 42 percent are women.
Only among the smallest parties in Parliament — the Greens and Die Linke, both on the left — are female parliamentarians in the majority.
When Chancellor Olaf Scholz formed his cabinet in 2021, he vowed that he would name as many women as men to be ministers. That balance stayed in place until Christine Lambrecht, the defense minister, was forced to resign over criticism about Germany’s provision of aid to Ukraine, and was replaced by a man.
Mr. Merz has cited Ms. Lambrecht as an example to explain why, when he names a new, conservative-led government, he will not be striving for gender parity.
“With it, we wouldn’t be doing women any favors either,” he said in a television interview late last year. The government is weeks away from being announced.
Mechthild Heil, who leads a group of women in Mr. Merz’s Christian Democratic Union, is concerned about the subordinate role women play in the party.
After taking note of the dearth of women’s voices in coalition talks, she went public with her worries, writing a letter to Mr. Merz and demanding that women hold 50 percent of the leadership roles in Parliament.
“I can give you many examples of really competent women who are not being heard, who are not even sitting on the negotiating teams now,” Ms. Heil said. Without women present during negotiations, she said, important issues could be missed.
Ms. Heil later explained why she had decided to go public.
“We are always being told to stay calm, that they’ll fix these issues — but we have heard these arguments for years and years and nothing changes,” she said.
Andrea Römmele, a political scientist at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin and a keen watcher of German politics, said that one reason so few women were represented was that the pool of candidates was relatively small. Many women, she said, have to deal with dual pressures of work and raising a family.
“You can’t underestimate how work-intensive political work is,” she said.
Another problem, she said, is that many networks within political parties — especially when it came to the Christian Democratic Union — formed years ago, when even fewer women were in position of power.
“It is striking when we now notice is how far behind we are all of a sudden,” she said.
