Kohl’s Party Sets Quotas for Women : Germany: Christian Democrats will set aside one-third of candidacies, posts. Polls have shown a loss of female voters.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union, seeking to broaden its appeal after a bare-bones election victory, decided Monday to adopt a quota system to boost the power and profile of women in the party.

The measure, narrowly approved at the Christian Democrats’ annual congress, ensures that a third of all party posts will go to women and that women will make up a third of CDU candidates in elections at all levels beginning next year.

Kohl, who was reelected as chancellor for a fourth term this month by a one-vote margin in Parliament, spoke out for the quota system as a way to begin strengthening the party for 1998 elections.

“If we want to get a start into the future, we have to do it now,” Kohl said. “The image of the CDU is colored by how it deals with change in society.”

The CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, are seen as socially conservative and dominated by graying men like Kohl, elected to his 11th term as party chief at the daylong congress.

Women have been campaigning for more power within the party for years, yet less than 14% of the CDU’s new parliamentary delegation is female--contrasted with an average of 26% for the entire German legislature and 59% for the leftist Greens party.

The Social Democrats, Germany’s leading opposition party, and the Greens adopted quotas in the 1980s, but the Christian Democrats had resisted.

That was clear at the party congress, a predominantly suit-and-tie gathering where women delegates gathered in groups to discuss strategy for prodding stodgy men.

“We have tried for 10 years to change the situation and we have had no luck,” delegate Ingeborg Mittelstaedt said. “I think this quota system is necessary. There is a generation of men (in charge) that believes a man is more intelligent, stronger and not disturbed by family affairs.”

The measure was controversial even among women, however, with some objecting that it reduced them to tokens and second-class citizens.

“I am decidedly against this quota, because we should judge people for their qualifications, not their gender,” said delegate Tonia Meyer. “For my part, I don’t want to get elected to a post and afterward have all men look at me with a patronizing air and thinking, ‘Our quota woman.’ ”

The party’s most prominent woman and parliamentary leader, Rita Suessmuth, answered critics, saying that “if it went by ability and the qualification of women, we wouldn’t be fighting about a third today but rather about an equal participation of women and men.”

The quota system was approved by a 416-361 vote. It goes into effect next year for a five-year trial period.

CDU polls showing that the party has lost women and younger voters clearly prompted Kohl to make one of the more surprising moves of his 12 years as chancellor--naming a 28-year-old woman from the former East Germany to his new Cabinet as minister for women, family, youth and pensioners.

But the minister, Claudia Nolte, is a crusading Roman Catholic anti-abortionist whose far-right positions are so extreme that some people in the party fear she could scare off as many women as she might attract.

Nolte once suggested that women who have had abortions should be required to work in a hospital for a year to make amends. Since her appointment, she has said she strongly favors the idea of the state’s paying women a cash bonus of 1,000 German marks (about $640) for each newborn baby.

Many women from the former East Germany feel that they have lost rights since the fall of communism and the 1990 reunification with the former West Germany. Unemployment is high among eastern women, who under communism had guaranteed jobs and child care centers.

Even westerners have their doubts about the new minister, noted for having curtsied before Kohl at a party meeting in Dresden in her efforts to draw his attention.

“Perhaps she is not the figure to integrate the women in Germany, especially the ones in the east,” said Karin Gedaschko, a lawyer and CDU delegate. “Her problem seems to be that she is not typical of the women in the CDU and eastern Germany too, for her age. I’m five years older, and I don’t feel that she represents me too well.”

Kohl’s attention to women’s issues is groundwork for the 1998 election, when the chancellor has vowed to step down. It is generally acknowledged that Kohl carried his governing coalition to its narrow, 10-seat majority in Parliament. The party needs to broaden its base if it hopes to continue its reign.