Slowly adopting: the impact of same-sex marriage legalisation on the attitudes of parliamentary candidates in Germany

In recent years, many European countries have legalised same-sex marriage (SSM). Germany is no exception. While ‘registered partnerships’ were introduced in 2001, it took another 16 years until SSM was legalised. This was mainly due to the high levels of coalition discipline that prevented the Christian Democratic Union’s (CDU/ CSU) coalition partners from legalising SSM by collaborating with opposition parties. In June 2017, however, the CDU/CSU allowed for a ‘conscience vote’ on SSM, in which party factions do not put any pressure on their legislators to vote cohesively (for a comprehensive analysis of how and why the CDU/CSU became more lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer [LGBTQ] friendly under Angela Merkel, see Schotel, 2022). Crucially, the CDU/CSU was still not particularly favourable towards SSM in 2017; only a minority of 24.7 per cent of their legislators voted for SSM legalisation (see Table 1). Following research analysing the shift in attitudes after SSM legalisation (Bishin et al, 2016), this article investigates how the legalisation of SSM has affected the position of CDU/CSU candidates on SSM.