Sahra Wagenknecht

Sahra Wagenknecht (German: [ˌzaːʁa ˈvaːɡŋ̍ˌknɛçt]; 16 July 1969) is a German politician. She was a member of the Bundestag from 2009 to 2025, where she represented The Left until 2023. From 2015 to 2019, she served as that party's parliamentary co-chair. With a small team of allies, Wagenknecht left the party on 23 October 2023 to found her own Eurosceptic, populist party, Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, which unsuccessfully contested the 2025 federal election, narrowly failing the 5% threshold. Since 2025, she has no longer held any public office.

Wagenknecht firstly joined the ruling SED months before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, then became a prominent member of the PDS from the early 1990s. After the foundation of The Left in 2007, she was a leading member of one of the party's most left-wing factions as leader of the Communist Platform. Her economic views have shifted since then. In 2011, she laid them out in her book Freedom instead of Capitalism, in which she analysed Germany's economic policy at the time of the euro crisis and criticised it on the basis of ordoliberalism.

She was 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. She has made some controversial statements about immigration and refugees and gender affirming care.

From 2020 onward Wagenknecht was less active in the Bundestag, but was often interviewed by German media. From 2021 to 2025 she was not a member of any parliamentary committee.

From 2021 she had openly considered forming her own party, due to growing and enduring conflicts within the Left Party. At the end of September 2023 Wagenknecht formed the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance political party, better known as BSW (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht). She ran as the Chancellor candidate of the BSW in the 2025 German federal election. In November 2025 she announced her resignation as leader of BSW.