State act for former Bundestag President Süssmuth: A preventing life | EUROtoday

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As of: February 24, 2026 • 3:03 a.m

At right now’s state ceremony, former Bundestag President Rita Süssmuth can be honored, a politician who was an exception – not solely, however particularly in a celebration just like the CDU. A assessment.

Rita Süssmuth was a fighter, even when, from her personal perspective, one who wakened late. She fought for ladies’s rights and parity – particularly in politics. But not solely. In her political life she was additionally involved with minorities, AIDS victims, immigrants – and in her final guide “On Courage” she was involved with the whole democracy: “We can save our values ​​- but only if we defend them!”

The politician, who was born in 1937, realized that she wakened late as a girls’s rights activist in her later years. When the instructor’s daughter and pupil Süssmuth had not but seen a lady as a professor within the Sixties, it didn’t scandalize her. It was solely when she turned a lecturer and professor herself that she realized the unequal circumstances for men and women in skilled life – in order that she felt she already knew what was necessary when she turned a minister.

She can confidently be described as brave, particularly within the political sphere of affect of the West German CDU – a celebration with which she has rubbed shoulders. A celebration that Spiegel described within the Eighties as having a “bowling brother mentality” during which it remained politically an outsider – and which it by no means left all through its life, regardless of appreciable disappointments. Süssmuth’s motto comes from one other of her guide titles: “If you don’t fight, you’ve already lost.”

One might after all say that the occasion made it doable for her to carry the second highest state workplace and honored her accordingly when she was nominated and elected President of the Bundestag in 1988. However, this may also be interpreted as a face-saving step by the then CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl – who was capable of eliminate a well being minister who had maybe too typically change into inconvenient for him within the cupboard on the top of the AIDS disaster.

Also controversial in AIDS coverage

At that point, Süssmuth clearly opted for a prevention and training coverage that was meant to keep away from excluding or stigmatizing these affected. At the identical time, Peter Gauweiler, her opponent from the CSU, campaigned for strict state anti-AIDS laws in Bavaria, together with obligatory testing. In the tip, the Chancellor adopted Süssmuth’s tips, which had been primarily based on scientific suggestions. The Süssmuth-Gauweiler dispute was legendary.

Süssmuth had repeatedly precipitated unrest within the CDU: for instance, when she campaigned for the criminalization of “marital rape” within the Federal Republic of Germany within the late Eighties, regardless of sturdy resistance throughout the occasion. It was solely in 1997 that this was modified in felony regulation within the late Kohl years. She acquired calls to go away the occasion in 2000 when she took over the management of the immigration fee arrange by SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder – and thus turned one of many pioneers of the republic’s first immigration regulation.

Joined the occasion on the age of 44

The instructional scientist switched from a tutorial profession to politics and solely joined the CDU in 1981 – on the age of 44. With her liberal-progressive stance, she rapidly turned one of many defining modernizer personalities throughout the Kohl CDU round Heiner Geißler – she known as him her sponsor. In 1985 she took over the Family Ministry from him, her first ministerial workplace, which from 1986 additionally included accountability for “women” in its title for the primary time. In 1989, alongside Geißler, Kurt Biedenkopf and Lothar Späth, she was considered one of Kohl’s inner-party opponents who wished to interchange him as CDU chairman.

Süssmuth has achieved loads politically inside and outdoors the Union. She by no means uninterested in emphasizing in interviews that this could not be performed alone – for instance within the battle for the best AIDS coverage, she mentioned on reflection in a BR interview in 2024 when she was 87 years outdated.

Sabine Bergmann-Pohl, the previous president of the freely elected People’s Chamber within the GDR, nonetheless sees Süssmuth’s successes from an East German perspective right now, however was amazed on the backwardness in girls’s coverage within the West: “At the beginning, I didn’t believe that I would end up in a patriarchal parliament where you still have to fight for women’s rights,” she mentioned ARD capital studio. So much has been achieved in politics, Süssmuth repeatedly emphasised. And by girls and – as she as soon as put it, “also with the participation of smart, future-oriented men”. Heiner Geißler was actually considered one of them. But he additionally failed to realize parity within the CDU.

“I am not a Macron of the CDU”

And not Süssmuth herself both. “I’m not a Macron in the CDU,” she as soon as mentioned on the sidelines of a dialog in 2021 tagesschau.de mentioned about it. That’s why she in the end felt like she had failed at an important level: The ratio of women and men in political workplaces within the Union is at present removed from 50:50, and the proportion of ladies within the CDU within the Union parliamentary group within the Bundestag has at present fallen even farther from 23.8 % in 2021 to 22.6 %.

In the Union, Süssmuth knew concerning the unattractiveness of a binding quota – particularly for younger, conservative girls who felt devalued by it and wished to make it on their very own. But with out dedication and wrestle, Süssmuth realized that it would not work; endurance alone will not get you wherever.

“As a minister, I learned: Stop asking for something – but ask about the legal basis or create it,” mentioned the politician in an interview a couple of years in the past tagesschau.de. Ultimately, from Süssmuth’s viewpoint, it will have been useful to write down the precept of parity for political workplaces into the Basic Law – then the quota debates, which are sometimes unlucky for the Union, might have been prevented.

She not too long ago said that ladies are literally undesirable in politics. The politician of the century leaves politics and society involved that this might change in direction of a extra constructive cooperation between women and men as an alternative of towards one another. This would proceed to require each sooner or later: combative, brave girls like she was, but in addition the participation of “smart, future-oriented men” – that is how one can perceive her political legacy.

With data from Gabor Halasz, ARD capital studio