Has Angela Merkel left a feminist legacy?

After decades of dodging the question of whether she was a feminist, earlier this month, the outgoing Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, unambiguously declared that she had given it more thought:

“Yes,” she said. “We should all be feminists”.

If we should all be feminists, has Merkel been one? Has she had that positive legacy? These questions warrant far less debate than they usually receive. The answer is a resounding “yes”.

In her first cabinet level job, as Minister for Women and Youth, Mrs Merkel waded into a host of highly topical debates. For all of its many, many faults, East Germany had at least been dramatically ahead of its time on women’s rights. Childcare had been made freely available; generous maternity leave had been instituted; reproductive rights supported; and the wage gap had been proactively reduced, with the right to work and right to equal pay enshrined in East German law decades before the US. 

At the same time, West Germany had been a laggard, with its socially conservative Constitutional Court overturning dozens of efforts at establishing gender parity. It is in the egalitarian East German context that Merkel was raised, and in the context of resolving the East-West German equality-gap that her first ministerial role took place.

Her first two acts as Minister show clearly Mrs Merkel’s attempt to strive for a gender-equal legacy — trying to ban sexual harassment in the workplace and endeavouring to appoint a gender-balanced civil service for the rebranded Ministry. Indeed, she waded into the controversial issue of reproductive rights, being the pivotal figure in the law that eventually overturned a 140-year-old limitation on abortion. 

At the same time, while being firmly against tokenisation, she supported a surprisingly provocative gender-floor for the Christian Democratic Union (guaranteeing that at least 25 per cent of their MPs were women). Notably her work also resulted in gender equality being put into the German constitution through a 1994 amendment.

Fast forward 12 years, and the gender dynamic in Mrs Merkel’s work becomes obvious once more. She secured the nomination to be her party’s Chancellor candidate in 2005 (after being ousted by the CDU/CSU’s “wise men”, who felt a woman like her would lose the 2002 election, which they lost anyway). In Germany’s traditional post-election debate, party leaders gathered to discuss the result and most importantly what coalition had the right to govern.

That’s when Merkel got her big break.

The incumbent Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder lost his cool and laid into her, going on a bombastic, gender-fuelled and testosterone-addled attack, declaring she had lost (despite the fact her party had outpolled his). Merkel endured the entire rant in stoic silence. Schröder’s misogynistic outburst would cost him dearly, as the following day even left-wing papers declared his arrogance an embarrassment to his own party’s women.

The irony shouldn’t be lost on anyone that Germany’s first female Chancellor owed her office, at least in part, to a misogynistic outburst. But it was a debt she would repay throughout the rest of her Chancellorship. During her first term, her Families Minister (a now infamous Ursula von der Leyen), implemented an income variable parental benefit, replacing the flat rate which had made taking leave unaffordable for many middle-income families. Similarly, in the transposition of the EU’s early 2000s women’s equality directives into German law, the Merkel cabinet went even further, strengthening protections from discrimination and creating an anti-discrimination agency.

In the second term, too, Mrs Merkel took a pro-female position, increasing the child allowance, expanding paternity benefits to ensure a more even distribution of tasks, as well as removing the laughable rule that had allowed noisy children to land parents in court.

Mrs Merkel’s third and fourth terms were much the same – gender quotas for corporate boards, increased sentences for sexual assault, expanded daycare, the inclusion of parental leave in the pension calculation, making single parentage easier and wage gap disclosure by big businesses. The policies of the Merkel cabinets have improved the lives of German women tremendously. Trudeau’s she-cesssion this is not.

Even ignoring the fact she has been a role model for women and girls globally, as the world’s most powerful woman for a decade-and-a-half, and has shifted attitudes to female power globally, her legacy in terms of policy is powerful. Doubting her legacy of helping women may be fashionable (especially given her chosen female successor Annegret Kramp Karrenbauer’s downfall), but it should not be.

Angela Merkel’s legacy is feminist through and through.

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