Frankly...Berlin  Feminism goes by the board in the election campaign

Berlin may stand for diversity and equality, but it’s clear from the current campaign for the upcoming Bundestag elections that Germany has still got a lot to learn about feminism. Here’s columnist Margarita Tsomou’s feminist take on the campaign to date.
 

Comments bemoaning this year’s bland, lacklustre and German election campaign have become as tiresome as the candidates’ standardized smiles on the election posters. And yet, over the past four years, civil society has put a number of urgent issues on the political agenda: What about the climate (which now seems beyond saving), the discrimination mechanisms of structural racism, or violence against women and queers and other abuses of power?

Targeting Women

Feminism does actually figure in the campaign – but in reverse: in the form of Annalena Baerbock-bashing, even though she’s been going out of her way to soft-pedal gender issues.
It’s striking that right after she announced her bid for chancellor, the Green Party candidate was criticized – actually vilified – not for her political positions, but as a private person: for being so young, with no prior experience in government and with two little children to look after. According to detractors, she might not have enough time for either job, for raising kids or handling affairs of state. Besides the fact that I can't remember ever having seen or heard a word about Scholz’s, Laschet’s or Habeck’s progeny and this brings back the old sexist trope of the uncaring working mother, the larger point is that when a woman runs for office, her private life is immediately held up for public scrutiny. According to Der Spiegel magazine, Baerbock has been targeted online by six times as much ad hominem – or rather ad feminam – hate speech as CDU candidate Armin Laschet: women are still regarded as deviations from the norm and are easier targets for personal attacks. Fake nude photos are circulating online too, a typical tactic for sexist attacks on female politicians and yet another flagrant demonstration of how sexism makes women more vulnerable.

A missed opportunity for feminism

But Baerbock isn’t turning the tables to use feminism for an electoral offensive. In fact, she’s outwardly quite weak on the feminist front: besides her sex and the way she plays the mom card, her adherence to the cause has not been writ large, whether in her book or in her speeches. But the Greens do explicitly champion feminism and LGBTQI+ rights in their party platform. Like Die Linke (the Left Party), whose platform is packed with (mostly social) gender issues, the Greens have come out strongly against the gender pay gap and gender-based violence, and for abortion rights. To judge from the CDU and SPD tickets, on the other hand, #MeToo and all feminist struggles of recent years seem to have passed these two parties by without a trace.
On the whole, the campaign has been even duller for feminists than for the rest of the public at large and we really must ask ourselves what else we’ve got to doto bring about real policy changes with regard to our issues.
We lack figures like New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Finnish PM Sanna Marin, who embody gender justice and diversity not only in their person, but also in their policies, leadership style and language. After all the feminist rhetoric and agitation, they far more patently herald the dawn of a new age at last, reflected in the makeup of parliaments and in politicians' profiles as well.
This new age doesn’t seem to have dawned in Germany yet, though the time is just right now to broaden our political horizons. So this year’s election campaign is at once a missed opportunity and a tragedy, seeing as we’ve already had a woman at the helm who is not a feminist.