Sahra Wagenknecht | |
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Member of the Bundestag | |
Assumed office 27 September 2009 |
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Constituency | Düsseldorf II |
Co-leader of The Left in the Bundestag | |
Assumed office 15 May 2010 |
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Personal details | |
Born |
Jena, East Germany |
16 July 1969
Nationality | German |
Political party | The Left (2007–present) |
Other political affiliations |
Party of Democratic Socialism (1989–2007) Socialist Unity Party of Germany (1989) |
Spouse(s) | Ralph-Thomas Niemeyer (1997–?) Oskar Lafontaine (2014–) |
Sahra Wagenknecht (German pronunciation: [ˌzaːʁaː ˈvaːɡn̩ˌknɛçt]; born 16 July 1969) is a German left-wing politician, economics graduate, author and publicist. She is a member of the National Committee of the Left Party and, since May 2010, deputy chairperson of the party. Since 2009, she has been a member of the Bundestag.
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. 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 Socialist Unity Party (SED) in early 1989. From 1990 she studied Philosophy and New German Literature as an undergraduate in Jena and Berlin but dropped out. She then enrolled as a philosophy student at the University of Groningen where she earned an MA in 1996 for a thesis on the young Karl Marx's interpretation of Hegel, published as a book in 1997. From 2005 until 2012 she studied economics at the TU Chemnitz, where she earned a PhD with a dissertation on "The Limits of Choice: Saving Decisions and Basic Needs in Developed Countries", subsequently published by the Campus Verlag.
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, an orthodox Marxist faction.