The CDU's Old-Fashioned View of Women

“If you want to know what’s missing from the new CDU program, you only need to mention one name: Rita Süssmuth. She is not merely an elderly lady; she remains a political fighter. She will soon turn 87, yet compared to what is presented in the draft of the new CDU fundamental program, she is incredibly young, imaginative, and modern,” writes Heribert Prantl in the *Süddeutsche Zeitung* (€).

Prantl: “The draft of the new CDU party program is not just conservative; it is so outdated, it could have been written by Franz-Josef Wuermeling,” the first Federal German Minister for Family Affairs (from 1953), who once warned against “total equality,” claiming it could lead to forced labor for women in coal mines.

The “family as the nucleus of society” is considered part of the “dominant culture” in the new draft, Prantl writes. The word *emancipation* does not appear even once, and *equality* is mentioned only in passing, “in vague contexts.” Friedrich Merz, the party leader, might argue that equality is no longer an issue since it has already been achieved. “But even the CDU’s own facts say otherwise,” such as: no woman in a top leadership position; the party leader and parliamentary group chairman is a man, as is the secretary-general; and less than a quarter of the Union’s members of parliament are women.

“On December 18, 1953, exactly seventy years ago, the Federal Constitutional Court issued its landmark ruling on equality. On that day, Karlsruhe mandated taking Article 3 of the Basic Law on equality seriously, not just as a nice phrase.” The sentence “Men and women are equal” had been written into the Basic Law five years earlier, thanks to the efforts of SPD parliamentary council member Elisabeth Selbert. The Federal Constitutional Court then forced the legislature to draft an equality law, which appeared in 1958.

“Experience shows: constitutional postulates achieve nothing unless translated into everyday law. (…) Mere formal equal treatment does not lead to equality when it encounters the unequal life situations of men and women. Therefore, laws promoting women, including quotas, must be passed; parity laws must ensure that the proportion of women in parliaments increases. The Merz-led CDU carefully avoids such questions. Rita Süssmuth, however, is fighting for parity with all the strength she has left. This is her final political battle. But she cannot count on the sympathy of her party leader or its secretary-general; they have grown comfortable with the status quo.”