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Next setback for advocates of parity laws: Brandenburg’s constitutional court has outlawed the regulation of gender-equal party lists. A similar sentence had previously been issued in Thuringia.
The law stipulated that in future an equal number of women and men should stand alternately in state elections on the lists. The Brandenburg judges have now accepted a lawsuit from the AfD and the NPD. The Young Liberals, the FDP youth organization, and the pirates had also filed constitutional complaints against the law.
The parity law interferes with the parties’ freedom to make nominations, “because state lists that do not comply with the zipper principle are rejected,” the judges now ruled. A political party is free to shape its goals. The question of equality “is left to the freedom of content of the parties.”
The Constitutional Court also criticized the fact that the law undermines “passive equality of voting rights” because it denies candidates access to a certain position on the list. A justification for the regulation by the equality requirement of the state constitution is not possible, he said. No sector of the population could derive the claim of the principle of democracy to be represented in parliament according to the proportion of the population. The right to equal opportunities of the parties is violated. The parity law discriminates against parties with an unbalanced proportion of men and women in their own ranks.
First federal state with parity law
Brandenburg was the first federal state with such a parity law. Last year, the state parliament voted by majority in favor of the red-red coalition law, with the support of the Greens. It is in force since June 30 of this year. The president of the Brandenburg state parliament, Ulrike Liedtke, defended the regulation. If half the population is women, the equitable representation of women is a democratic imperative, she said at the August hearing. A parity regulation has been or is being discussed in several federal states.
In July, the Thuringian constitutional court struck down the local electoral law, according to which parties must alternate between men and women on their candidate lists for state elections. The justices basically argued that the Parity Law undermined the right to freedom and equal choice and the right of political parties to freedom of activity, freedom of programs, and equal opportunities.
Also at the federal level, women are fighting for greater participation in parliaments, for example, the president of the Green parliamentary group, Katrin Göring-Eckardt, and the former president of the Bundestag Rita Süssmuth (CDU). In the 2017 elections, the proportion of women in the Bundestag fell from 37.3 percent to 31.2 percent. In the Brandenburg state parliament, the proportion of women parliamentarians is around a third.
