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COMPARE: Which European nations have the highest (and lowest) percentage of women MPs?

When election results came in on Sunday, Iceland became the first European country where women hold more than half the seats in parliament. We take a look at Europe's best and worst performers when it comes to female representation in politics.

Published: 26 September 2021 16:41 CEST

COMPARE: Which European nations have the highest (and lowest) percentage of women MPs?

Icelandic Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir talks to supporters of her Left Green Movement at a party event in Reykjavik on September 25, 2021 after the announcement of partial results in the country's general elections. - Iceland's election on September 25 saw the left-right coalition government widen its majority. However, Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir's Left Green Movement emerged weakened while her right-wing partners posted strong scores, casting doubt over her future as prime minister. (Photo by Tom LITTLE / AFP)

The Althing is thought to be the longest-running parliament in the world. But on Sunday, the Icelandic national parliament really made history.

Election results point to an elected chamber where 33 out of 63 seats (52 percent) will be held by women. No other European country has ever had a female-majority parliament – although Rwanda (61 percent), Cuba (53 percent) and Nicaragua (51 percent) all fall into this category.

Iceland has ranked topped the World Economic Forum’s gender equality rankings for the past 12 years and was the first country to elect a female president in 2018.

It has had a pioneering gender-equal pay law that puts the onus on employers to prove they are paying the same wages to men and women since 2018 .

Iceland is not a part of the European Union but does retain close ties with the bloc – which lags some way behind. According to the European Institute for Gender Equality, women made up on average 32 percent of national parliament members across the 27 EU member states in 2020.

The Best Performers

Sweden

Sweden is the most progressive EU country as far as equal gender representation in politics is concerned. As many as 47 percent of all MPs in Sweden are women, as are half of its government ministers. The foreign, finance and health ministries are all run by female politicians.

Gender discrimination has been illegal in Sweden since 1980. Ever since 2006, the country has been listed as one of the top five most gender equal countries in an annual 150-country ranking produced by the World Economic Forum.

Finland

Finland comes in at a close second, with 46.5 percent of parliamentary seats held by women. In 2019, Sanna Marin made global headlines after being elected as the world’s youngest serving Prime Minister. She formed a coalition government of five parties, all of which were led by women.

Most Finns, including our PM @MarinSanna, have grown up with #Moomins. These fairytale characters, created by Finnish artist Tove Jansson, teach us about courage, friendship, and equality. Come experience their stories this fall at @NatChildrens in DC! @FinGovernment #MoominUSA pic.twitter.com/JuGsiAndyE

— Moomin (@MoominOfficial) September 13, 2021

In 1906, Finland became the first country in the world to extend the vote to women. It also allowed women to stand for parliament. In elections the following year, 19 women won seats. The first female president of Finland was Tarja Halonen who was elected in 2000.

The Nordic region as a whole has the highest proportion of female parliamentarians anywhere in the world.

Spain

Forty-four percent of seats in the Spanish congress are held by women and all four government deputy leaders are women. One of those deputies, Nadia Calviño is also in charge of the Economy Ministry.

Following a recent reshuffle, 54 percent of cabinet members are female meaning that Spain has one of the most gender-progressive executive branches in the world.

“La importancia de los modelos de liderazgo para que las generaciones de niñas puedan verse y pensar que pueden ser presidentas de una compañía, o vicepresidenta de un gobierno”@NadiaCalvino vicepresidenta primera del Gobierno de España.#PremiosFEDEPE2021 pic.twitter.com/phRcIuM81R

— FEDEPE (@MujeresFedepe) September 21, 2021

The Worst Performers

Hungary

Hungary has the lowest share of female politicians in the EU. Just 12 percent of MPs are women and just three out of 16 government ministers are women, who weren’t even given full voting rights until 1945.

The right-wing Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, espouses a particularly macho brand of politics and mainstream political discourse in Hungary tends to confine women to the conservative role of child-bearing houseworkers.

Romania

The second-worst performer in the EU is Romania, where a mere 19 percent of parliamentarians are female.

The country was led by a female Prime Minister, Viorica Dancila, in 2018-19 but she ultimately stood down following a vote of no confidence. Some analysts claim she was used as a puppet by Liviu Dragnea, the former head of the socialist party who was banned from taking the position himself after being convicted of election rigging.

Czech Republic

The Czech Republic also has a pretty dismal female representation in parliament. Twenty-three percent of Czech MPs are women. This number has been slowly creeping up – but from a very low bar. In the government formed after elections in 2010 for example, there was not a single female minister.

The in-betweens

So where do other European countries lie?

Only 31.4 percent of MPs are female in Germany but that of course is susceptible to change with upcoming elections. Austria fares much better with 39.8 percent female representation in parliament.

In Italy, 35.6 percent of MPs are female. In France this figure jumps to 38.6 percent. Denmark and Norway, true to Nordic form, hover at around 40 percent, while the Netherlands sits at 33 percent.

For a full list of European gender statistics, click here.

Member comments

Anonymous - 26 September 2021 at 22:42 CEST

Funnily, after a recount in one constituency, this is no longer true. The number of seats held by each party stays the same but a woman drops out for each of 3 parties and a man takes their place. Its now, quite arbitrarily, 33 men to 30 women, the opposite of what it was this morning. 2 other parties exchange one man for another. The whole thing is bizzarre.

In glorious Icelandic: https://www.ruv.is/frett/2021/09/26/endurtalning-konur-ekki-lengur-i-meirihluta

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With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced on Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.