Moving into a new world of parliamentary participation

At the end of February 2018, German women did it again. Chancellor Angela Merkel—supposedly the most powerful woman in the world, if one believes Forbes—won her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party’s election overwhelmingly to form a coalition government with the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which had been hotly debated at the party and national level for months. Also, the candidate for the CDU’s powerful general secretary position, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, was elected by party delegates with a democratic majority of 98.87 percent. (If she ever comes to Beirut on a political visit, her name will be another tongue-twister for Lebanese anchors.) Moreover, only days before the CDU met on February 26, Merkel had announced the names of CDU ministers in the coalition government (which at time of this writing still required internal approval of the SDP party) and named three women to be among the six CDU ministers. The SDP, meanwhile,