Source: Politics<\/p>\n
COLOGNE, Germany \u2014 On a warm evening in early September, Annalena Baerbock took the stage on a packed city square here. There were just over three weeks to go until Germany\u2019s general election, which will take place on Sunday, and around 2,000 people had come out to see the progressive, pro-environment Green party\u2019s first-ever candidate for chancellor. \u201cYou can feel the change here on Wilhelmplatz,\u201d Baerbock told the audience, to cheers and applause.<\/p>\n
As she spoke, four young girls toward the front of the crowd climbed a metal divider to get a better look at the candidate. Baerbock, energetic with microphone in hand, occasionally referred to them in her speech: When a handful of right-wing protesters started shouting, she reminded them there were children present, and during her Q&A session, she came over and answered the girls\u2019 question about how to live a more climate-friendly life. Over the course of the rally, other girls wandered over from their parents until about a dozen stood there, grouped together near the stage, eyes turned up toward Baerbock. <\/p>\n
These girls have an experience of politics American girls don\u2019t: They have never known a country in which a woman didn\u2019t hold the highest office in the land. For the past 16 years, Angela Merkel has been a steady hand at the country\u2019s helm and arguably the most powerful woman in the world.<\/p>\n
But in Baerbock’s candidacy, they’re also watching a real-time demonstration that even in Germany \u2014 a country often held up as a model for embracing and re-electing a powerful woman leader \u2014 sexism isn’t easy to root out of politics. It can be difficult even to disentangle the two.<\/p>\n
Baerbock was an early contender in the election, leading her two main rivals for several weeks in the spring \u2014 an unprecedented feat for the Greens, who have never before had a real shot at the chancellery. Since then, she has come under unrelenting attack for a series of off-the-trail missteps, including revelations of plagiarism and resume inflation, while male rivals have more easily sidestepped their minor scandals. She has also been the target of frequently gendered disinformation attacks, one of which featured her face photoshopped onto a naked woman\u2019s body with a caption implying she was a sex worker. Along the way, Baerbock has faced more familiar examples of sexism, such as questions about whether she can balance the chancellorship<\/a> with being a mother. <\/p>\n The Greens are now polling at 16 percent<\/a>, behind the center-left Social Democrats and Merkel\u2019s conservative Christian Democrats, and Baerbock is effectively out of the chancellor\u2019s race. Baerbock herself has avoided speaking too explicitly about sexism in the campaign, though others close to her have been vocal on the subject. In an interview with POLITICO Magazine this month, she mentioned the connection but was cautious about blaming the attacks on gender. <\/p>\n \u201cThere are always going to be moments when, especially as people run out of real arguments, they hit below the belt \u2014 we know that about campaigning,\u201d Baerbock said. \u201cBut in this election, there’s also been an element of hate and smear campaigning, that’s been exacerbated by social media, at times gender-based.\u201d<\/p>\n Her candidacy has left German political observers wrestling with the question of just how open-minded Germany actually is when it comes to women leaders. Baerbock might be the second woman to run for Germany\u2019s top office, but she\u2019s the first to experience the post-Merkel climate for female politicians seeking the job. It\u2019s a contradictory environment in which a female candidate is no longer a historic first and embracing gender is far more culturally accepted \u2014 but in which the winner will preside over a parliament that is still more than two-thirds male, more skewed than many of Germany’s European neighbors. And, at least for Baerbock’s supporters, it’s hard not to look at the substance and tone of the attacks on her and detect very different treatment than her rivals.<\/p>\n “One can’t say that Germans don’t trust a woman to do [the job of chancellor]. We had a first example,\u201d said Franziska Brantner, a member of parliament from the Greens who led the party\u2019s campaign in the state of Baden-W\u00fcrttemberg earlier this year. \u201cBut still, a female candidate is getting different attacks \u2014 and on a different level \u2014 than male counterparts.\u201d<\/p>\n Female politicians in Germany are disappointed, but not surprised, that a country that has broken such a visible gender barrier still has so far to go.<\/p>\n “You would think that, with a female chancellor leading the government, things would have steadily improved for women in politics,\u201d said Sawsan Chebli, a state secretary in Berlin\u2019s city government who is running for the Bundestag as a Social Democrat. \u201cI wish that were the case.\u201d<\/p>\n In many ways,<\/span> Baerbock is exactly what Merkel wasn\u2019t: She\u2019s young (just 40 years old), running on a platform of structural change (Merkel leads one of the two major centrist parties), and has openly embraced being a woman and mother (the chancellor has, until recently, largely avoided discussion of gender).<\/p>\n When Merkel first ran for chancellor in 2005, she faced her own uphill road: Ascending the ranks of the male-dominated CDU, she was referred to as \u201cKohl\u2019s girl,\u201d a reference to former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Merkel\u2019s mentor and predecessor as party leader. She\u2019s gotten questions about her clothes, and critics have implied that as a woman without children she doesn\u2019t fully understand the lives of mothers and families. Even the well-known nickname often applied to Merkel, Mutti (or \u201cmother\u201d), has sexist undertones. <\/p>\n The difficult atmosphere Merkel has confronted might help explain why women\u2019s representation hasn\u2019t advanced as much as some hoped during her 16-year tenure. She chose early on to strategically downplay her gender, and likely calculated that for a leader of the conservative CDU, becoming a vocal champion of feminist politics would be a liability. <\/p>\n Just 31 percent<\/a> of the members of Germany\u2019s parliament are women, which is higher than the U.S. Congress (27 percent) and the global average (25 percent) but lower than many of Germany\u2019s European neighbors. Four years ago, the percentage was actually higher \u2014 37 percent \u2014 but dropped when the heavily male, far-right Alternative for Germany party won seats in 2017. In executive positions, women are far rarer: Just 9 percent of Germany\u2019s mayors are women, and women lead only two of the 16 federal states. <\/p>\n Only since Merkel announced that she wouldn\u2019t seek a fifth term has she begun to speak more openly<\/a> about gender and feminism. In 2019, in a rare long-ranging interview<\/a>, she discussed the challenges of being a woman in politics (\u201cI wear the same blazer four times within two weeks, the letters start pouring in,\u201d she said) and the need for gender parity in public life, which she said \u201cjust seems logical.\u201d<\/p>\n And earlier this month, she finally used a word<\/a> that remains loaded in German politics: \u201cYes, I’m a feminist,'” Merkel said for the first time.<\/p>\n That Merkel has become more comfortable opening up about the topic may be a sign of the changing times. Baerbock, by contrast, speaks on the campaign trail about being a mother to two young daughters, and spent much of a recent debate performance discussing policies to lift up women in Germany.<\/p>\n But the Green candidate has confronted a challenge that Merkel, who still doesn\u2019t have a Twitter account, didn\u2019t have in 2005: online hate speech and disinformation attacks that experts say are often gendered and disproportionately target women. <\/p>\n Baerbock has been hit by an especially high amount of disinformation, according to studies by the German Marshall Fund<\/a> and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue<\/a>, from Russian state-backed sources as well as from inside Germany. Some of these attacks play on preconceived notions about the Greens, like the false claim that the party wanted to ban housepets to reduce carbon emissions. But other attacks have been distinctly sexist: One image that made the rounds online featured Baerbock\u2019s face photoshopped onto a naked female body with the caption, \u201cI was young and I needed the money.\u201d <\/p>\n Michael Kellner, the Greens\u2019 campaign manager, has spoken out about the disproportionate challenges Baerbock has faced due to her gender. \u201cAs an experienced campaign manager, I can tell you that this spread of hate and lies affects women much more than men,\u201d he told Die Zeit<\/a> in June.<\/p>\n Female candidates from across Germany\u2019s political spectrum are familiar with online abuse. Earlier this year, the magazine <\/a>Der Spiegel <\/a>found<\/a> that 69 percent of female parliamentarians in Germany had experienced “misogynistic hate,\u201d and 36 percent described physical attacks on themselves or on their office or home. Similarly, the European Academy for Women in Politics and the Economy recently found that female mayors in Germany experience significantly more harassment.<\/p>\n This comes as Germany, like other countries, is grappling with an overall rise in hate speech, fueled in part by the AfD \u2014 a party which, like similarly-minded politicians in the U.S., continually pushes the boundaries of what\u2019s considered acceptable speech. <\/p>\n Wiebke Winter, a 25-year-old Bundestag candidate from Merkel\u2019s center-right CDU, said that overall, Germany\u2019s political scene has become more welcoming to women because parties like hers recognize they need to be more representative of the population as a whole.<\/p>\n But after a recent TV appearance where she discussed her role as her party\u2019s new adviser on climate issues, her Twitter account was flooded with hateful attacks. \u201cI really don’t know why,\u201d Winter said in an interview. \u201cI think I broke too many clich\u00e9s at once: I’m a woman for climate in the CDU, and that’s not the story that people want to tell.”<\/p>\n The online harassment was one thing, but when someone started burning her campaign posters close to her home, she contacted the police. <\/p>\n Chebli, the SPD candidate in Berlin, travels with police protection due to the volume of credible death threats she\u2019s received. In Chebli\u2019s case, multiple factors make her a target: She\u2019s not just a woman, but also a Muslim daughter of refugees who speaks openly about racism in Germany. “Women who have a voice, who are visible, who defend themselves \u2014 these are the ones who are most often affected,\u201d she said. “What happens online isn’t detached from what happens in analog life.\u201d<\/p>\n Many of the online attacks<\/span> targeting Baerbock are examples of what the German Marshall Fund calls \u201csexualized subversion of credibility<\/a>\u201d \u2014 playing on gender stereotypes to enhance existing concerns about a female candidate\u2019s competence and trustworthiness. Baerbock took a number of hits that undermined her credibility in voters\u2019 eyes, and her candidacy never fully recovered. <\/p>\n After a near-flawless campaign rollout in April, Baerbock\u2019s party shot to first place in the polls. She appeared on the cover of Der Spiegel, posing confidently with her hands on her hips, projecting the assuredness and ease that her opponents (both middle-aged white men) were lacking at the time. But the Greens\u2019 numbers began to decline after a series of unforced errors. First, German media reported that Baerbock hadn\u2019t disclosed supplementary income from her party. Then, evidence emerged that she had inflated parts of her resume<\/a> and plagiarized numerous<\/a> passages<\/a> in her book (she has since apologized for the plagiarism, promising to add more accurate citations<\/a>). <\/p>\n Baerbock\u2019s missteps quickly became the defining narrative of her campaign: “Not even a quarter [of Germans] still believe Baerbock!” read one headline<\/a> from the tabloid Bild. <\/p>\n But while Baerbock\u2019s allies acknowledge the campaign\u2019s errors, some believe gender bias is subtly amplifying an existing narrative of incompetence and inexperience. Both her rivals, the CDU\u2019s Armin Laschet and SPD\u2019s Olaf Scholz, had minor plagiarism scandals of their own; while neither was as extensive as Baerbock\u2019s, those revelations made far fewer waves and haven\u2019t defined their campaigns in the same way. And some of the more serious scandals the two male candidates have faced, whether Laschet\u2019s failure to distance himself from an ultraconservative candidate in his party or Scholz\u2019s involvement in a major tax-evasion controversy, also had less of an impact. (On Thursday, my POLITICO colleagues marveled at how Scholz had survived multiple scandals, calling him<\/a> the \u201cTeflon candidate.\u201d)<\/p>\n \u201cAnnalena Baerbock obviously has to meet stricter standards than her competitors,\u201d the writer Tanja D\u00fcckers argued in a column<\/a> for Deutschlandfunk.<\/p>\n Petra Wei\u00dfflog, head of the Greens in the eastern city of Cottbus, said things have improved for women in politics since she first ran as her party\u2019s lead candidate in Brandenburg in 1994. But she can\u2019t help feeling the party\u2019s male co-leader, Robert Habeck, would have been treated differently than Baerbock. <\/p>\n “These small faux-pas that happened with Annalena, they weren’t her fault: That was her advisers, who didn’t vet things as carefully as they should have,\u201d Wei\u00dfflog said. “I think if these things had happened to Robert, everyone would have simply said, ‘Well, he’s a very busy man.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n For advocates of women in politics, the questions about Baerbock\u2019s credibility highlight a familiar difficulty: how to distinguish legitimate scrutiny of a candidate\u2019s competence from what they see as unfairly heightened expectations for women. <\/p>\n