Sahra Wagenknecht

Sahra Wagenknecht (born Sarah Wagenknecht; ; 16 July 1969) is a German politician, economist, author, and publicist.

Wagenknecht was born on 16 July 1969 in the East German city of Jena.

Her father is Iranian and her mother, who worked for a state-run art distributor, is German.

Her father disappeared in Iran when she was a child.

She was cared for primarily by her grandparents until 1976, when she and her mother moved to East Berlin.

While in Berlin, she became a member of the Free German Youth (FDJ).

She completed her Abitur exams in 1988 and joined the (then ruling) Socialist Unity Party (SED) in early 1989.

Wagenknecht became a prominent member of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) from the early 1990s.

After the foundation of The Left, she became a leading member of one of the party's most left-wing factions as leader of the Communist Platform.

She has been a controversial figure throughout her career due to her hardline and populist stances, statements about East Germany, immigration and refugees (which moved away from traditional antiracism), and her political movement Aufstehen.

From 1990, Wagenknecht studied philosophy and New German Literature as an undergraduate in Jena and Berlin, completing mandatory coursework, but did not write a thesis as she "could not find support for her research aims at the East Berlin Humboldt University".

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the transformation of the SED into the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), Wagenknecht was elected to the new party's National Committee in 1991.

She also joined the PDS's Communist Platform, a Marxist-Leninist faction.

She then enrolled as a philosophy student at the University of Groningen, completing her studies and earning an MA in 1996 for a thesis on the young Karl Marx's interpretation of Hegel, supervised by Hans Heinz Holz and published as a book in 1997.

In the 1998 German federal election, Wagenknecht ran as the PDS candidate in a district of Dortmund, garnering 3.25% of the vote.

Following the 2004 European elections, she was elected as a PDS representative to the European Parliament.

Among her duties in the parliament were serving on the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs and Delegation, as well as the Euro-Latin American Parliamentary Assembly.

Following the merger of the PDS and the WASG that formed the Left Party (Die Linke), Wagenknecht considered campaigning for the position of party vice-chair.

However, party leaders such as Lothar Bisky and Gregor Gysi objected to the idea primarily because of her perceived sympathies for the former German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany).

Following the controversy, she announced that she would not run for the post.

From 2005 until 2012 she completed a PhD dissertation at the chair of Microeconomics at TU Chemnitz, on "The Limits of Choice: Saving Decisions and Basic Needs in Developed Countries", awarded with the grade magna cum laude in the German system and subsequently published by the Campus Verlag.

Since 2009 she has been a member of the Bundestag, where until 2023 she represented The Left.

Wagenknecht successfully contested a seat in the 2009 federal election in North Rhine-Westphalia.

She became the Left Party's spokesperson for economic politics in the Bundestag.

On 15 May 2010, she was at last elected vice president of the Left Party with 75.3% of the vote.

Early in 2012, the German press reported that Wagenknecht was one of 27 Left Party Bundestag members whose writings and speeches were being collected and analyzed by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

From 2015 to 2019, she served as that party's parliamentary co-chair.

With a small team of allies, she left the party on 23 October 2023 to found her own party in 2024, Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, to contest elections onwards.

Wagenknecht was elected co-leader of the Left's Bundestag group in 2015 alongside Dietmar Bartsch succeeding long-time leader Gregor Gysi.

Wagenknecht won 78.4% of votes cast.

As the Left was at the time the largest opposition party in the Bundestag, she became a prominent leader of the opposition for the remainder of the parliamentary term.

Bartsch and Wagenknecht were the Left's lead candidates for the 2017 federal election.

She has been one of the main driving forces in the formation of Aufstehen, a left-wing political movement established in 2018, which exists outside of traditional political party structures and has been compared to the French movement La France Insoumise.

In March 2019, Wagenknecht announced her withdrawal from her leadership role within Aufstehen, citing personal workload pressures and insisting that after a successful start-up phase, for which political experience was necessary, the time had come for the movement's own grass roots to assume control.

She complained that the involvement of political parties at its heart had "walled in" the movement.

She would nonetheless continue to make public appearances on its behalf.

The biography Sahra Wagenknecht. Die Biografie by Christian Schneider (cultural studies scholar) was published in 2019 and focuses on Wagenknecht as a person, including her family background and interest in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

From 2020 onward Wagenknecht was less active in parliament, but often interviewed by German media.

She is not a member of any parliamentary committee.

Since 2021 she has openly considered forming her own party, due to growing and enduring conflicts within the Left Party and at the end of September 2023 she formed BSW – Reason and Justice political party in 2024.