Usually what brings down a politician is less the original action, more the hypocrisy or cover-up. In the case of Jens Spahn, until recently one of Germany’s most important conservative members of parliament, it was not a failure to be open. He admitted what he had done and was proud of it, to the point of tears. The problem was that he seemed to forget that it contradicted the moral mores that he and his party advocated.
The crime? Paying a woman in the United States to bear a child on behalf of him and his same-sex partner. In Germany, such a transaction is against the law—as it is in a host of European states, including France, Italy, and the United Kingdom.
The ban leads couples, heterosexual and same-sex, to turn to brokers in other countries or sometimes directly to individuals. This is entirely legal, and many people do it. The problem in Spahn’s case is that he was the leader of the parliamentary party of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which only months ago reaffirmed its ban on domestic commercial surrogacy. He was in the room and nodded it through, even though he knew at the time that a woman was carrying his future child. And he repeatedly advocated for the ban.
Sensing the dilemma, Spahn then did a touchy-feely interview with the mass-circulation daily Bild-Zeitung, gushing at the imminent arrival of the newborn, at no time appreciating the mismatch between rhetoric and reality.
Cue a furor, and within a couple of days, Chancellor Friedrich Merz was required to invite Spahn to resign. I say “required,” but in fact, Merz was mighty pleased to have gotten rid of a potential threat, a man who was a perennial thorn, someone who was seen as just a tad too close to the far-right Alternative for Germany party.
Spahn has one thing in common with Merz: consistently low opinion poll ratings and a long list of enemies. Several other big fish in the CDU appeared to enjoy his comeuppance. But that doesn’t quite explain the opprobrium that was heaped on him or why it was this issue rather than other previous controversies—not least his handling of protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he was health minister—that finished him off.
Spahn’s downfall can only be explained by the deeply rooted—so deeply rooted that it is rarely acknowledged—social conservativism of German politics.
Germany’s postwar political settlement and the societal structures that it inherited meant the Catholic Church would inevitably play a prominent role. The CDU—which has led governments for roughly 54 of the 77 years of the federal republic’s existence—had “Christian” as much as “Democrat” in its title.
Indeed, the stability that underpinned the Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle, was based in a vision of small-town, church-going communitarianism and traditional gender roles. The motto that began in the Gründerzeit, the foundational years of the German Empire of the late 19th century, and was later adopted by the Nazis continued to have salience well into the 1950s and ‘60s: Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church).
That, one might think, particularly when living in the anything-goes capital Berlin, belonged to a bygone era. That would be a misreading.
The existing law banning surrogacy is a case in point. It is motivated by the same logic that informs Germany’s existing ban on egg donation, which is punishable by imprisonment, although sperm donation is perfectly legal. Underlying the discrepancy is the concept of “split motherhood.” Legislators fear that separating the genetic mother (the egg donor) from the gestational mother (the woman who gives birth) harms the child’s psychological welfare and identity. Sperm donation does not create this split, as the birth mother remains both the genetic and gestational mother. (Earlier this year, former Health Minister Nina Warken, who in the past few days has been reshuffled to become the head of Merz’s embattled chancellery, called for a review of the egg-donor issue.)
Surrogacy adds an additional alleged psychological harm to the woman giving the baby away after carrying it to term. With both bans, there is an implicit suggestion that biological parents have a privileged role to play in any ideal family—and an implicit judgment of same-sex parents. (It is impossible to know what Spahn’s fate would have been had his partner been a woman.)
Germany’s relationship with homosexuality is complicated. Criminalized between men under an 1871 law, it was practiced with alacrity—but only in Berlin and one or two other big cities—during the Weimar Republic of the early to mid-1920s. During the reign of the Nazis, thousands of queer men (and some women) were sent to their deaths in concentration camps, a horror that has been openly acknowledged in subsequent decades.
Far less known is that it took until the end of the 1960s for same-sex relations to be decriminalized, but even then, restrictions remained, and the age of consent was higher than for heterosexuals. Indeed, communist East Germany was marginally more liberal on this score. It was only in 1994 that the unified Germany repealed the original legislation enacted under the kaisers.
In the three decades since, Germany has come a long way. Queer culture is widely celebrated in places such as Berlin, culminating in the annual Christopher Street Day parade in July, known in some other countries as Pride. Yet conservatives, including senior figures in the present government, have sought to keep a distance from the whole movement. In 2025, shortly after taking office, Merz himself justified his recommendation that parliament no longer fly the rainbow flag for the occasion, as had become the custom, insisting that the Bundestag was “not a circus tent.”
Last weekend’s attack on the Christopher Street Day parade—in which one woman was killed and several people injured—has shaken the capital city. It has also shone an uncomfortable spotlight on the nexus between Islamist terrorism, the queer community, and conservatives’ relationship to homosexuality. Merz and other senior figures were criticized by some for double standards after they rushed to condemn the assault as an attack on Germany’s “tolerance” and “openness.”
The concept of social liberalism is selectively interpreted, and several pieces of legislation remain on the statute book that would seem out of keeping in modern times and unacceptable in other countries.
The two most egregious holdovers from the past are the church tax and tax splitting.
All German taxpayers are required to devote at least an extra 8 percent of their tax liability to the church that they attend. The choice is restricted to Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism. There seem to be no plans to extend the “privilege” to Muslims, Hindus, and others.
It is possible to not pay the tax by declining a religious affiliation on your tax form. If you join and then change your mind, it is quite a rigmarole. You are required to renounce your affiliation in writing and then appear before a local district office or court. The assumption—presumption—that citizens by default would want to belong to a church attests to religion’s continued strong influence on public life. Proposals come and go to reform the law, but there seems to be little momentum behind abolishing it.
The other very German anachronism is tax splitting. Unlike most other developed countries, married partners are not taxed as individuals, but as a couple. This lumps together both people’s income and divides it by half, leading the higher earner (usually the man) to fall into a lower tax bracket. The less income that the second person earns, the more advantageous the device becomes. As a result, there is little benefit—financially, at least—for the lower earner (usually the woman) to work more than part time.
In recent years, the arrangement has been extended to same-sex married couples and to civil partnerships of all types. So, in one sense, it could be seen as modern. Whether it is or not, it loses the exchequer 25 billion euros (about $29 billion) a year, which is why the finance minister and vice chancellor, Lars Klingbeil, mooted possible reform. The result? No little skepticism that he would succeed and no little opposition to the principle—or rather, the prospect of minimizing the tax burden.
None of this is a coincidence, recalling again that the concept of Kinder, Küche, Kirche has not gone away. While parental leave is relatively generous—and fathers take as much of that as the couples wish—the assumption remains that the mother will stay at home for the entirety, or most of, a child’s early years. The idea of paying someone to look after your offspring is generally frowned upon, including by many who might otherwise consider themselves liberal.
What surprises most is that the feminist movement in Germany is hardly shy and retiring. Yet most of its advocacy seems to be based in issues around language and identity. Woe betides anyone who doesn’t use the female form for most nouns—thus, the TV news anchor welcomes the audience with Lieber Zuschauerinnen und Zuschauer (female viewers, male viewers). Or the vexed question of the colon or asterisk when abbreviating in writing: Zuschauer:innen or Zuschauer*innen.
Might this performative side of politics be simply an excuse, a displacement, to avoid the thornier questions? Neither the Greens, nor the Left Party, and certainly not the Social Democrats seem to be in a hurry to prioritize some of the nuts-and-bolts issues that are embedded in traditionalism. Given that so little has changed for so long, everyone seems accustomed to the status quo.
Half of all German women in employment do part-time work, double the European Union average, partly because schools end early and childcare provision is so poor. Germany is among the lowest-performing states in the bloc when it comes to women in the boardroom and women as senior corporate executives. As for women in politics, the country is midway on the EU list, but unlike other countries, the number of women members of parliament has fallen over the past decade.
Last, but by no means least important, Germany’s abortion laws are among the strictest in Europe. The termination of pregnancies remains officially classified as a criminal offense under Section 218 of the criminal code, is largely excluded from statutory health insurance coverage (and medical education and training), and requires mandatory state-regulated counseling with a mandatory waiting period.
What does this medley of legislation have to do with the resignation of a cabinet minister who, in the end, broke no laws? If the issue has repercussions more wide than the general who’s-up-who’s-down dynamic of the political battle, it is to shine a light on the wider question of reproductive politics in Germany, and to show that it remains highly sensitive and surprisingly difficult to change.
