BERLIN — In a rare political setback for the world’s most powerful woman, Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday found herself forced to give in to a rebellious bloc in her own party who insisted that Germany’s leading companies be compelled to increase the number of women on their boards.
Ms. Merkel, Germany’s first female chancellor, has long resisted the quota system for giving women board membership. It is an issue much debated throughout Europe, and adopted in countries from Norway to France but fiercely contested elsewhere — nowhere more so than in the Continent’s most powerful economy.
Ms. Merkel, a 58-year-old trained physicist who is married but has no children, became chancellor in 2005. Despite filling nearly a third of her cabinet with women, she has never overtly campaigned for equality or focused on the uniqueness of her position. And she has repeatedly rejected calls, including from the European Union, to require companies to admit more women to the highest levels of management.
But this week, the woman nicknamed the Iron Chancellor for her ability to face down pressure found herself brought up short by her labor minister, Ursula von der Leyen, 54, a trained doctor, mother of six and daughter of a prominent conservative politician who was originally brought into the cabinet by Ms. Merkel precisely to improve child care and other aspects of women’s rights.
Ms. von der Leyen this week held firm to her demand for quotas until the chancellor finally agreed that Germany Inc. would have to accept board quotas for women — albeit starting in 2020, three years after the third term that Ms. Merkel seeks in September elections.
The measure of the chancellor’s defeat — and her need for party unity ahead of the elections — emerged in blistering commentary and her own interview to the newspaper Bild on Thursday.
Issues of gender equality and family policy have always been aired “with a great deal of passion” by the Christian Democratic Union, Ms. Merkel told Bild.
“The C.D.U. is the main political party in Germany long concerned with how we can bring more women into top positions,” she added. “And as the leader of this major party, I take it very seriously when so many of my colleagues, in so many groups, are impassioned by this.”
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which generally supports the Christian Democrats, even compared Ms. von der Leyen’s triumph to an article written by Ms. Merkel in the same newspaper, in December 1999, that disgraced her former mentor, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, over millions in unexplained party donations.
“Without von der Leyen, the C.D.U. women would have never gotten their quota,” the Frankfurter Allgemeine wrote Thursday. “The fact that behind the scenes in the C.D.U. there is talk of blackmail just shows the powerlessness of the losers, and in terms of power politics, the losers are Merkel” and several other senior party members, it said.
Ms. von der Leyen and some two dozen other dissenters had threatened to break with their party and vote for a draft law proposed by the opposition that would have required companies to have 20 percent of management boards made up of women by 2018.
Their support would have sufficed to get the opposition measure passed. As the vote drew closer, Ms. von der Leyen refused to back down.
With the general election only five months away, her party agreed — after what a senior member described as “intensive discussions” — to abandon their previous position of voluntary quotas for companies. Instead, they called for a legally binding quota of 30 percent women in boardrooms starting in 2020.
Although that is three years beyond any third four-year term that Ms. Merkel might win, the deal stuck. Ms. von der Leyen agreed reluctantly to toe the party line, and the opposition proposal was defeated on Thursday by a vote of 320 to 277, with one abstention.
Ms. von der Leyen left right after the vote, having sat stone-faced throughout a stormy debate in which she declined to speak. Ms. Merkel also did not speak.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/business/global/merkel-concedes-on-quotas-for-women.html?partner=rss&emc=rss