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 no longer holds any public office.
Wagenknecht 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 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.
Wagenknecht was born on 16 July 1969 in the East German city of Jena.
Her father, who is Iranian, came to West Berlin to study;
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.
In 1990, the GDR dissoluted. From 1990, Wagenknecht studied philosophy and modern German literature as an undergraduate in Jena and Berlin, completing the mandatory coursework, but did not write a thesis as she "could not find support for her research aims at the East Berlin Humboldt University". 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.
From 2005 until 2012 she completed a PhD dissertation in 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.
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.
In the 1998 German federal election, Wagenknecht ran as the PDS candidate in a district of Dortmund, garnering 3.25% of the vote. In the 2004 European election, 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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
The biography Sahra Wagenknecht. Die Biografie by Christian Schneider was published in 2019 and focuses on Wagenknecht as a person, including her family background and interest in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In November 2019, she announced her resignation as parliamentary leader, citing burnout. Her activities from 2017 to 2019, culminating with her resignation, are covered in the 2020 documentary film Wagenknecht, directed by Sandra Kaudelka.
Wagenknecht was again nominated as the lead candidate on the party's North Rhine-Westphalia list in the 2021 federal election. She was re-elected, but described the results as a "bitter defeat" for her party.