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Can I ask your source for "the birth rate didn't change, at all" based on policies to bridge family life and working life? Everything I'm seeing suggests that return-to-work protections and generous parental leave provisions did have discernibly positive effects on birth rates in Germany, e.g.: article, except in some circumstances where shortages of daycare spots made it effectively impossible for people to use the parental-leave benefits in the first place. In one instance, the government seems to have reduced the duration of parental support and observed a reduced birthrate in consequence. That seems to me like pretty direct evidence that the policy works.
Obviously, saying the policies worked (i.e., had a positive effect on fertility) isn't the same as saying that they returned TFR >2 or even that they were enough to balance any unrelated downward pressures on birthrate. But it does suggest that the women were telling the truth that their childbearing decisions were motivated at least partly by economic fears, particularly about the difficulty of making a living after having children. It also suggests that the coercive approach of increasing women's economic anxiety by forcing them out of the workforce/ limiting their education and ability to provide for a family in extremis is moving in exactly the wrong direction.
The article is from 2018 and talking about specifically post-2015 increases. That just-so-happens to be the timing of the largest migration waves ever to enter germany. It even itself admits that the only group which plausibly stayed structurally the same - mothers with a german passport - had only a change from 1.43 to 1.46, which they call "notable" but which most would call "pretty much nothing". Attributing these changes to policy is, to be frank, imo bordering on willful misinformation. In general including foreigners/immigrants in most modern stats leads to nonsensical results, since everything gets drowned in composition effects. It's the equivalent to comparing test scores between a rich kid prep school and a public school in a poor district and claiming that it's due to this or that teaching approach; No, it's 100% due to differences in the populations (which, btw, don't need to be genetic; I know quite well how much difference simply highly motivated & supportive parents make).
You can see the stark differences quite well here. Again, note that the foreign population, at different times, included substantially different percentages of a) turkish majority-muslim migrant workers, b) italian majority-catholic migrant workers, c) syrian majority-muslim asylum seekers, d) north african asylum seekers (often, but not always masquerading as syrians), e) Ukrainian majority-orthodox asylum seekers and a million other smaller groups. Concluding anything from those numbers except the composition is pure insanity.
So that leaves us with german mothers subgroup. Now, there is an argument that you can see a very slight increase from around 1.3 in the 90s to a top of almost 1.5 in the mid 10s (note that the timeframe of the DW article is actually flat), and that this is due to policies. That's prima facie plausible, but firstly as you point out generally considered not nearly enough, and secondly doesn't match very well with the timing of the actual policy changes usually considered major. The biggest was the 2007 Elterngeld, which was deliberately designed to benefit working mothers and families in general as well as increase male investment into children. Can you see it in the plot? I can't, not as a one-time, not as a rate-increase, nothing. The second was the Elterngeld Plus in 2013, which accomodated part-time work in early childhood specifically. There is a modest increase here between 2013->2014, but it's still small, also looks more like a continuation of a former trend and worse, the line flattens shortly afterwards anyway. Another problem is the covid bump and the post-covid downturn; Family policies in germany are still very generous and didn't really change during covid, but the overall change observed easily drowns out all the other changes. Neither does it fit with economic or general anxiety; those were, if anything, especially high, not low, during covid.
And finally, even the german mothers actually have a significant problem with composition effects, even if they're not quite as strong. See the large increase in foreign births vs a corresponding small decrease for german mothers in 2011? This isn't an immigration wave nor policy effects, it's entirely due to the Zensus 2011 re-counting of who belongs into which group. Most immigrants stay in western countries nor is getting a passport particularly hard, and germany is no exception to that rule. So culturally noticeably different foreign groups with non-western marriage/family patterns get increasingly counted as german. Btw, afaik France's high official birth rates are for example almost entirely due to this as well, thanks to comparatively early postcolonial immigration waves.
And this even applies to rather old immigrant groups, and even non-immigrants. The region where I'm from has a specific town with a large church of pentecostals who fled from Soviet Russia long ago. Back then, however, it was a very small group. When I grew up (90s to 00s), they were already a substantial percentage of a specific town. Nowadays they are literally half the population (I can send you a DM with a link if you do not believe it, but don't want to share it publicly for OPSEC). They have consistently high (6-10 children is not exceptional) birth rates, high cultural cohesion and high retention rates, similar to Hasidic Jews in Israel. They are large enough so that our entire region is among those with the highest birth rates in germany, and has at multiple times been number one. Though admittedly my heritage (conservative catholics) isn't doing badly there, either (I literally do not know how many cousins I have; it's around 30-40).
Which leads to the explanation that makes by far the most sense to me: Culture. The pentecostals do not earn well (in fact, substantially below average). They do not have better family benefits. But what they have is social structures that consistently, consciously and openly advocate for and support marriage and family formation, while suppressing all influences that plausibly reduce it, such as casual dating, the focus on self-actualization, abortion and birth control, non-standard sexualities, education, female careers .... the list is long. It's a matter of priorities; Having children is hard and expensive, and no entry on the list is in itself mutually exclusive with high birth rates, but our culture just has a low status and low priority for #children, so almost any competing topic or enabling technology plays a part in the reduction..
If somebody put a pistol to my head and said I have to do something that reliably gets us back to >2.1 TFR, fast, I'd absolutely go with the right-wingers. Ultraconservative religious groups exist all across the western world and still have extremely high birth rates; If we become more like them, we will, too, have a higher TFR again, QED. Family benefits policy nerds are almost exclusively using bullshit composite stats and are thus ignorant about very basic realities. That doesn't mean, however, that I WANT us to do this; As it happens, I'm best described as a technoutopian transhumanist, and I do think we would have to pay a large price in technological progress if we were to attempt this, let alone my libertarian distaste for coercive measures. Me and my wife are trying our best to find a modern synthesis, where we consciously sacrifice what is necessary to have the number of children we desire while still keeping the parts we value about the modern system. But that doesn't make the right-wingers wrong on the facts.
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