The proportion of women in parliament has shrunk again
Less than a third of the next Bundestag will be made up of women. We must not get used to this underrepresentation.
We are ready for a change in politics. Close coordination between the CDU and CSU," CSU leader Markus Söder posted on X a few days ago. Below is a photo that couldn't be more telling: six men at a conference table with breakfast plates, cola and business documents. It is inconceivable that the Union is aiming for a style of politics in which only men actually participate. But it is true: There will be even fewer women in the new parliament than in the previous one, where the proportion of women had already fallen.
In the future Bundestag, there will be only 204 women out of 630 members, which means that their share is just 32 percent. Most recently, it was just under 35 percent. The media usually present diversity statistics very quickly when the final election results are available. Then there is usually an outcry: What, so few women? Women make up half the population, and they must be politically represented accordingly! Sentences like this can be sung along to like a mantra.
The fatal thing about this is that the interests of women and minorities will play an even smaller role in the future than they have in the past. The declining proportion of women is mainly due to the CDU and the AfD, two parties with predominantly men in their ranks . With a CDU chancellor, Friedrich Merz, even women who have made it into parliament lose a chance of being adequately represented in the cabinet. Even before the federal election, Merz had announced that if he won, he would not necessarily rely on parity in the cabinet. According to Merz, women are not as self-confident as men, and giving them high government offices would not do them any favors.
Since the end of the 1970s, the proportion of women in the Bundestag has grown steadily. The hope that equality would be consolidated in this way became more and more solid – until 2017. At that time, the proportion of women fell by almost 5 percentage points – the AfD had entered parliament for the first time.
The Bundestag 2025 is lucky in its misfortune: the FDP and BSW, with their homeopathic proportion of women, failed to clear the five percent hurdle and thus saved the Bundestag from an even greater embarrassment. Only the Greens and the Left Party managed to pull it off a little, with more women than men in their ranks. But both parties are in the opposition - and thus without influence.
