More women in parliament

Ms. Laskowski, why is a parity law like the one in Brandenburg necessary?

Because it obliges all parties that want to take part in the 2024 state elections to draw up lists of candidates with parity, i.e. alternating women and men or vice versa. It is a response to a democratic grievance that has persisted for a good 100 years. 101 years after the introduction of active and passive women's suffrage, which made women visible for the first time as half of the people in 1918, Germany still lacks their equal democratic participation, or in other words, sovereignty. Symptomatic of this is the low number of female parliamentarians. On average, it is about 30 percent. However, the population consists of about 50 percent women and 50 percent men. In fact, women make up 51.5 percent, i.e., the majority. Measured against this, the proportion of women in parliaments is too low. In the Bundestag, it is currently a good 30 percent. Women are therefore clearly underrepresented, and their numbers are even declining.

The reason for the low number of female candidates lies in the party structures. Statistics show that female candidates are nominated much less frequently than male candidates. Only in the statutes of the Green, Left and SPD parties are there already parity regulations for nominating lists of candidates. This is not enough.

Because of the glaring disparity between female and male representation, a "male gaze" has dominated politics in the Federal Republic since 1949, to the detriment of women. This has not changed to this day. Issues that are relevant to women are either not taken up at all or are taken up reluctantly and completely inadequately, such as the "Pay Transparency Act" of 2017. Only "equal parliaments" with a balanced proportion of female and male parliamentarians will change legislation. That is the key to change!

What was your role in pushing for the Parity Act and how did you come across this issue?

I formulated the original draft for the Brandenburg law, which was introduced by the Green Party. For the German Women Lawyers Association (DJB), which supports parity-based electoral law reform, I dealt with the French parity law of 2001 early on. After that, it was clear that there is no legal reason why the German legislature should lag behind the French legislature. Constitutionally, everything we need to justify a parity law is available in the Basic Law. Surprisingly, after the French parité law came into force in 2001, there was no discussion of this issue in Germany, either in the press or among legal experts. It almost seems as if a discussion should be avoided. That is now a thing of the past. The discussion is on.

In most parties, women are in the minority. Shouldn't men feel discriminated against if half the candidates are women?

No. In a democracy, the yardstick is the people, Article 20 of the Basic Law, i.e. the citizens. It comes down to the two core groups of the people, women and men. Democracy does not serve an end in itself. It serves only the sovereignty of the people, i.e. the self-determination of the citizens. It is the task of the parties to ensure the self-determination of the citizens. Nor do they fulfill an end in themselves; they serve democracy. They are not private enterprises. Political parties are obligated to take up the sociopolitical ideas of the entire population, and thus also those of women, regardless of their programmatic content, and to reflect them in parliament.

Women are socialized differently than men. They have different experiences, not least with sexism emanating from men. Women and men experience reality differently, they develop different ideas and set different priorities. A "female" and a "male" view develop. Politics must take up these different male and female perspectives and bring them into the democratic decision-making bodies with equal weight. This is where the binding rules of the game are decided in the form of laws for society. For this reason, a balanced number of female and male parliamentarians must be involved in decision-making.

The proportion of women or men in any party is irrelevant. We do not live in a "GDR participation" in which citizens would have to buy effective exercise of their fundamental right to equal democratic participation through party membership. The fundamental right to democracy, exercised in the context of elections, is available to all citizens on an equal basis even if they are not party members. However, since women are less strongly represented than men, especially in the "traditional" parties, these parties must ask themselves: Why is that? "Masculine parties" need to change structurally and provide equal opportunities. Parity laws pursue this goal. They ensure equal opportunities for female candidates and that the concerns of female citizens are reflected to an appropriate extent in parliaments. 

Keyword representative democracy: Does a parliament have to reflect the population exactly? Can't a man represent women?

It's about women and men, the core groups of every society. Without these two core groups, society is not sustainable. The same cannot be said about other social groups. These two groups must therefore be reflected in parliament. This is already recognized in the rest of Europe, but not here. It is a very German discussion.

In theory, a man can certainly represent women, but in fact that has never worked out in 70 years of the Federal Republic. Just think of marital rape, which was only criminalized in 1997. In the end, it was a cross-factional coalition of women in the Bundestag that pushed through the criminal offense. It was the female members of parliament who represented and enforced the interests of women citizens.

Incidentally, it has long been recognized in political science that a person's socialization determines his or her view of the world. Imagine if 80 or 90 percent of the members of the Bundestag had been women for 70 years. Would you feel represented? Probably not.  

Wouldn't that set a precedent for other social groups? People with a migration background and non-academic educational qualifications are also underrepresented in parliament. Why no parity law for them?

It has nothing to do with precedents. The crucial thing is to find a constitutional basis. For men and women, the core groups in society, this is already found in the Basic Law. For other groups, it is much more difficult. If we as a society thought there was a need for greater representation of other social groups, we should discuss it. But there would be difficulties in doing so. You talked about migrant background. Who is actually a migrant? If your grandparents immigrated to Germany or just your name sounds foreign, and you were born and grew up here and have German citizenship, you are hardly one. Do you then have a migration background? And which migration groups are we talking about? There are numerous ones in Germany. That would be a complicated discussion. Whether the terms can be meaningfully defined seems rather questionable. But please, we can discuss everything.

Interview: David Wüstehube