Across Europe, gender equality has become a focal point of political contestation, increasingly entangled with broader struggles over democratic norms and legitimacy. This paper analyses how political parties in Germany position themselves on gender equality issues during the 2025 federal election campaign. Germany represents a particularly interesting case. As a liberal and consolidated democracy, it faces rising ideological polarization and pressures from the populist right and anti-gender mobilizations, while simultaneously being considered a laggard in adopting gender equality policies within the Western European context.
Theoretically, our analysis builds on research on polarization, gender backlash, and the mainstreaming of far-right discourse in party competition, where we conceptualize gender equality as a symbolic terrain of political boundary-drawing and ideological differentiation. Empirically, we analyse data from the Open Expert Survey 2025, mapping party positions across the political spectrum on six gender-related policy issues. Moving beyond the conventional focus on single aspects of gender equality, we adopt a multidimensional perspective that encompasses a range of issues related to women’s rights, same-sex marriage, and gender diversity. Methodologically, we measure positional polarization as the deviation of each party’s stance from the midpoint between the two most extreme parties per item, allowing a relational understanding of party conflict structures. Our results show that polarization is highest on emerging equality policy issues like gender self-determination and inclusive language, whereas established ones, such as reproductive rights and same-sex marriage, appear more politically consolidated.
To contextualize and validate our findings, we compare the expert-based positions from the survey with party manifesto data from 2025. While general ideological alignments on the different gender equality policies are consistent, we observe notable variation in issue salience and selective omission - particularly among the SPD and FDP - indicating intra-party ambivalence and/or strategic de-emphasis. These divergences underscore how contestation over gender equality reveals not only inter-party polarization but also internal tensions within parties themselves.
By combining expert assessments with manifesto analysis in a recent case, our study contributes to broader debates on the politicization of gender in Europe, showing how anti- but also pro-equality positions increasingly shape mainstream party competition beyond right-wing populism.
