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 in 2024, Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, which unsuccessfully contested the 2025 federal election, failing to gain a single seat. Since 2025 she no longer holds any public office.

Wagenknecht became a prominent member of the Party of Democratic Socialism (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 shifted since then; she laid them out in her book Freedom instead of Capitalism, in which she analyses Germany’s economic policy at the time of the euro crisis and criticises it on the basis of ordoliberalism.

She has been a controversial figure throughout her career due to her hardline and populist stances, statements about East Germany, immigration and refugees, her opposition to gender affirming care, and her political movement Aufstehen. 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 had openly considered forming her own party, due to growing and enduring conflicts within the Left Party and at the end of September 2023 Wagenknecht formed the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance political party, better known as BSW (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht), at the start of 2024. She ran as the Chancellor candidate of the BSW in the 2025 German federal election.