When Feminist Ideas Lose Power: Coalition Magnets and Policy Change in German Gender Governance (1998-2025)

After the turn of the millennium, reforms such as the Childcare Funding Act (2008) and the Parental Leave Reform (2015) marked what Blum (2016) termed a “transformative-radical policy change” toward greater gender sensitivity in German family policy. Feminist governance principles—promoting maternal employment, father involvement in care, and recognition of diverse family forms—became embedded in mainstream policymaking. Yet key structural continuities persist: a gender-equal, non-transferable parental leave model remains absent, the Ehegattensplitting tax privilege endures, and Germany continues to rank low in the EU on pay equality and care distribution. These contradictions, evident before the rise of the far-right AfD, have since been amplified by its challenge to established equality norms. Against this background, we examine these contradictory developments in German gender governance and why fundamental transformation remains elusive. Drawing on Sylvia Walby’s gender regime theory, Rahel Jaeggi’s concept of progress and regression, and Vivien Schmidt’s discursive institutionalism, we conceptualize political institutions as gendered but dynamic structures that enable both change and continuity. The stagnation of gender equality cannot be attributed solely to institutional inertia or right-wing backlash. Instead, long-term discursive dynamics across the political spectrum reveal how feminist ideas have been normalized, domesticated, and stripped of their transformative potential. Empirically, we conduct a qualitative content analysis of 39 parliamentary debates (2003–2021), complemented by a quantitative text analysis of all party manifestos from 1998 to 2021, focusing on parental leave and childcare reforms. We demonstrate that Wahlfreiheit (“freedom of choice”) and Vereinbarkeit (“work–family reconciliation”) act as coalition magnets (Béland & Cox) for parliamentarians and parties: vague yet positively connoted ideas that enabled cross-party consensus and opened reform pathways, but gradually lost transformative force. We term this discursive dynamic “regressive progress”: feminist governance in Germany initially achieved progressive institutional implementation and a discursive normalization, but over time, the very mainstreaming of gender equality ideas carried a ‘regressive moment’ that stalled further transformation. With the rise of the AfD from 2017 onwards, the party discourse faces more ideological and partisan challenges. Our case study illustrates both success and fragility of feminist mainstreaming under neoliberal and populist pressures within contemporary governance.