Women as Political Leaders
“Indira and Thatcher were aberrations in the predominantly male world of politics” (Gandhi biographer)
These days, when the European Union is headed by Ursula von der Leyen and the Democratic party’s candidate in the US election is Kamala Harris, women political leaders are commonplace. When tackling the subject of women at the helm - as heads of governments or of mainstream political parties - there are two main issues that come to mind.
The first issue has to do with where, when and in what circumstances this trend started. The second issue is the deeper significance of appointing women to top positions of power.
It has to be emphasised that the appointment of women as chiefs of government is a political experiment started in the 1960’s in the Third World. Thus, the first ever woman prime minister was Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). She was head of the government three times, once in the 1960’s, for 7 years in the 1970’s and a third time in the 1990’s. Before that she had been an adviser to her husband, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, the founder of Ceylon’s Socialist Party and the country’s prime minister between 1956 and 1959, when he was assassinated.
Later that decade, India’s Congress Party appointed Indira Gandhi - the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru - as prime minister. She was the original “Iron Lady” (H. Kissinger), nicknamed as such because of her very tough approach to dealing with the intractable issues confronting India at the time. Thus, she decided to face down Sikh separatists by ordering the military to storm the Golden Temple, which led to her assassination by her two Sikh bodyguards in 1984.
The young state of Israel appointed Golda Meir as prime minister in 1969, the first woman to occupy this position and so far the only one. She subsequently lost her job because of the Yom Kippur war, which led to a big number of casualties for the Israeli army as a result of a lack of preparedness.
One of Indira Gandhi’s early disciples was none other than Margaret Thatcher, who at the end of the 1970’s during a severe economic crisis succeeded in becoming the leader of the Conservative Party and British prime minister, the first woman to hold these positions within the British establishment.
After the German reunification, which posed special challenges for the German state, the CDU Conservative Party appointed Helmut Kohl’s protégé Angela Merkel as its leader in 1998, as she was also one of the few high profile politicians in the party hailing from the former East Germany. She was elected chancellor in 2005, again the first woman to be entrusted with such high office in the country.
The second issue concerning women as top political leaders that I would like to mention here is the why. What are the reasons for putting a woman in charge at the very top ?
More often than not, the choice of a woman as head of government in the West is a clear indication of the dysfunction of a political system or of a party, one that is experiencing great difficulty in managing the state’s affairs or its internal dynamics.
Contrary to current wisdom, women are not selected for such positions simply in order to satisfy gender equality criteria. They rise to the very top when the political or economic crises experienced in some parts of the world are so severe that most other experienced politicians try to avoid taking the plunge and shouldering the responsibility for the crisis. In other words, women are not selected as top political leaders in the Western world because they are considered the most competent or best equipped to manage a country’s or main party’s affairs, but simply because the men prefer to take a backseat in times of high political stress, as they are more averse to committing political suicide and/or have more lucrative opportunities in the private sector.
The abovementioned women leaders left behind them controversial legacies. They were polarising figures in their own countries. From leaving the state unprepared for war, like Meir, or opting for attacking a religious institution with soldiers, like Indira, to starting an unnecessary war in the Falklands (and endorsing Indira’s military actions against the Sikh temple), like Thatcher, and again, opening a continent’s borders for a million Syrian refugees, like Merkel, women’s political records can be considered - at best - a mixed bag.
Appointing women to high office is not a silver bullet solution for improving the performance of a party or a political system. Instead, meaningful reforms and painstaking efforts spanning more than one electoral cycle have to be undertaken, until political systems start performing again to the satisfaction of the voters.