According to IPU data, the rate of women MPs in the new German Bundestag rose to 35 percent and there is a significant increase in the number of young MP’s compared to the previous period.
As the new German Bundestag sits for the first time on 26 October, IPU data shows that it has more women MPs and that the number of young MPs has significantly increased compared with the previous legislature elected in 2017.
IPU Parline data shows that out of the 598 seats in the Bundestag, more than a third are women (34.92 per cent) compared with 31.45 per cent in the outgoing parliament.
This is also above the global average which currently stands at 25.8 per cent. This means Germany has moved up to the 42nd place worldwide compared with 54th place for the previous legislature.
The proportion of women in the Bundestag increasing from 31 to 34 percent was “much too modest” to see it as good news, Green Party politician Claudia Roth.
If equal rights were what was at stake, then Roth was convinced that we don’t need “slightly more equal rights, but equal rights”. After all, women make up 51 percent of Germany’s population.
Around half of the Green Party’s parliamentary group in the Bundestag are women and the party has a quota written in to its constitution, which Roth believes is a recipe for success.
Many capable young women in the new parliamentary group were able to use the quota as “a key that opens the door for them so they can show what they’re capable of”, she said.
Jensen believes that to get more women into parliament, a political goal also needs to be set so that more women feel that politics is something that’s relevant to them, she told ARD.
CDU politician Franziska Hoppermann also thought grassroots work was important: “We need to get women enthusiastic about politics and give them space to get involved, in the same way we massively increased the proportion of women involved in local politics,” said Hoppermann, who is regional chair of the party’s Women’s Union in Hamburg and one of the new members of parliament.
Just under a fourth – 36 – of the conservative party’s new Bundestag seats are occupied by women. Only far-right party AfD has fewer women percentage-wise.
The President of the Bundestag: Bärbel Bas
The Social Democrats, who emerged as the strongest party in the September elections, have named their candidate – Bärbel Bas as the President of the Bundestag, only the third time in the country’s history that the highest parliamentary office has been held by a woman.
Two transgender women also sit in the new lower house, both from the Green party: Tessa Ganserer from Nuremberg and Nyke Slawik representing the western city of Leverkusen.
Bundestag is younger
The Bundestag is also now significantly younger than before. In the new house, 65 MPs are under 30 compared with 3 in 2017. Overall, 42 per cent of MPs are under 45 years compared with 23.3 per cent in the last house.
Ulrich Lechte, from the Free Democratic Party and Board Member of the IPU Forum of Young MPs, said “A new era has just begun in the German Parliament with a generational sea change. It’s wonderful to see many new MPs of my own generation or younger. It shows how many younger people have voted for the first time for smaller parties like my own.”
The youngest MP of the Bundestag, Emilia Fester from the Green Party, is a 23-year old theatre director from Hamburg.
“What we saw in Germany with the jump of younger MPs is quite spectacular,” Mariana Mutzenberg, a program officer with the Gender Partnership Program at the IPU, said.
Sources: The Local, Inter-Parliamentary Union, Pass Blue