Sahra Wagenknecht 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, Alliance for Social Justice and Economic Reason, 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.