Bernd Riexinger

Bernd Riexinger (born 30 October 1955 in Leonberg, Baden-Württemberg) is a German politician of Die Linke and a former trade-union official. The Bundestag archive lists him as non-denominational and trained as a bank clerk, as party chair of Die Linke from 2012 to 2021, and as a member of parliament from 2017, returned on the Baden-Württemberg state list for constituency 258, Stuttgart I.

From 1980 to 1990 he was a full-time works councillor at the Leonberger Bausparkasse, and from 1991 a union secretary. He became managing director of the Stuttgart district of the services union ver.di. In 2003 he helped initiate protests against Agenda 2010. He sat on the party's state executive in Baden-Württemberg after earlier activity in the Labour and Social Justice – The Electoral Alternative (WASG).

On 2 June 2012 a congress in Göttingen elected him co-chair with Katja Kipping. In the second ballot he took 297 votes (53.5 percent), ahead of Dietmar Bartsch with 251 votes (45.2 percent); Der Spiegel described him as the candidate of the left-wing trade-union current around Oskar Lafontaine and as the party's chair in Baden-Württemberg. He and Kipping did not stand again at the digital congress of 27 February 2021, when delegates chose Janine Wissler and Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, subject to a postal-ballot confirmation. The day before, in his farewell speech, Riexinger called for a renewed fight for social justice during the coronavirus crisis.

He entered the Bundestag in 2017, at 62. In January 2025 he told the Stuttgarter Zeitung that he would not stand again and would not sit in the next Bundestag. In the 20th legislative period the Bundestag listed him as an ordinary member and group spokesperson on the transport committee. After the Die Linke parliamentary group was dissolved he sat without a Fraktion from 6 December 2023 and, from 2 February 2024, in the Gruppe Die Linke. The members' assembly of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation elected him chair on 29 November 2025. He received 58 votes to 51 for Jan Korte after Heinz Bierbaum withdrew; the Bundestag register had listed him as a foundation board member from 26 November 2022.

Early life and education

Childhood and schooling

Bernd Riexinger was born on 30 October 1955 in Leonberg, in Baden-Württemberg, and has no religious affiliation. He has described the family as a "classic working-class household" in which his father voted for the Social Democratic Party of Germany. His father was a carpenter who later retrained as a heating fitter; his mother was a weaver who afterwards worked in a bakery. Early childhood in Mühlhausen, he told the Stuttgarter Zeitung, was "okay". A move to the neighbouring village of Münklingen, a district of Weil der Stadt north-west of the town centre, was not: the paper called it a horror, the two villages being at odds, and reported that he spent two thoroughly bad years there. His mother was killed in a car accident when he was 20.

Although the house had no books, Munzinger records that he became an avid reader after a godfather, when Riexinger was 12, gave him a volume on the Knights of the Round Table, and that he was drawn to the rock and folk music of the hippie years. He attended a Hauptschule and then a Handelsschule, a commercial school. In 2012 he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that he had been a pupil spokesperson and that "everything was highly political". Teachers who had arrived from the West German student movement at the end of the 1960s, he later said, encouraged critical, left-wing and anti-authoritarian thinking in school. He said he had always seen himself as a leftist, already found the SPD not left enough, and did not join it.

In his home village he was in a children's group and from there joined the Bund Deutscher Pfadfinder, which he has described as a left-wing youth organisation rather than traditional scouting. He said the group studied dialectical materialism and the economic theory of Ernest Mandel and taught him how to organise. A 2013 taz portrait added that in 1971, drawing on anti-authoritarian education, he worked with children's groups and had once wanted to become a development-aid worker. On his own account he was state chair of the Bund Deutscher Pfadfinder in Baden-Württemberg from 1978 to 1990.

Apprenticeship and civilian service

Unsure as a teenager what to do, he took his mother's advice and trained as a bank clerk rather than seeking development work; he later said the apprenticeship had been more his parents' idea than his own. In 1971 he began that apprenticeship as a Bankkaufmann at the Leonberger Bausparkasse. During it he was quickly elected youth representative of his intake and became active in the trade-union youth, arguing for apprentices' rights. By his own account the firm, despite what he called good performance, did not want to keep him on because of that engagement; he went to court, won, and had to be employed.

In 1974 he began Zivildienst, civilian service in place of conscription, as a conscientious objector. He has tied the refusal to pacifism: in 2012 he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that he had refused military service because he saw himself as a pacifist, and that this had not changed. The same year he was a co-founder of a self-managed youth centre in Weil der Stadt, part of the youth-centre movement, and Munzinger places his early peace-movement activity alongside that work and the civilian service. In 2021 he said the centre still existed and that the scouts' organisation there had been important to his politicisation.

Trade-union career

Works council at the Leonberger Bausparkasse

Riexinger trained as a bank clerk at the Leonberger Bausparkasse in Leonberg, in the Böblingen district of Baden-Württemberg. He later said that, during the apprenticeship, he quickly became youth representative for his year. His Bundestag biography lists him as a full-time released member of the works council at the building society from 1980 to 1990. A magazine profile put the move from the counter to that office at age 25; a dpa portrait described roughly a decade, until 1991, spent as full-time representative of the workforce. The firm remained a large regional building society after he left; in April 2001, with 1.14 million contracts, its board presented a long-planned merger with Wüstenrot. The taz, writing when he was elected co-chair of Die Linke, placed his political home in the union left: works councillor at Leonberg, then a full-time official of the retail, banking and insurance union HBV.

HBV and ver.di in Stuttgart

He became a full-time union secretary in 1991. He told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that he had hesitated before joining HBV's regional leadership, where, he said, the officials came from the undogmatic left. In 2013 he described the brief as banks, health insurers and insurance companies, and therefore strikes by minorities rather than industrial majorities. He recalled a 1992 banking dispute in which about 2,000 employees marched through central Stuttgart.

On 19 March 2001 HBV merged with ÖTV, the DAG, IG Medien and the postal workers' union to form ver.di. n-tv reported nearly three million prospective members and an HBV vote of about 84 percent for dissolution; registration that summer made the fusion effective and returned the DAG to the German Trade Union Confederation. Riexinger was managing director (Geschäftsführer) of the Stuttgart district, the state capital and neighboring counties, from the founding until 2012. A dpa profile at his departure put the district at about 50 employees and some 51,000 members.

In early 2006 ver.di made Baden-Württemberg the first focus of a fight with municipal employers who wanted to lengthen the week from 38.5 to 40 hours without extra pay. In 100 workplaces more than 94 percent of members voting backed a strike, which the union said endangered about 10,000 full-time municipal jobs in the state. Riexinger told der Freitag that the Stuttgart region had gained nearly 1,000 members during the dispute; that hospitals and nurseries would stop for one day in the first week, with a further day added each week, while refuse collection stayed out; and that, if still striking, the union would take at least 2,000 people from the region to Strasbourg on 14 February against the Bolkestein directive. He also recalled a 2002 Stuttgart campaign against privatization which he said had gathered 60,000 signatures. After nearly nine weeks the sides settled on 39 hours. He told Stuttgart refuse workers that a 39-hour week for everyone was neither a resounding victory nor a real defeat: "After 14 years of standstill we have finally fought back." Thirty-nine hours, he said, was "shit", but better than 40 and "a realistic result".

In July 2007 a third bargaining round for Baden-Württemberg brought no employer offer, and ver.di called a strike; nationally it sought 5.5 to 6.5 percent, with late- and night-work supplements the main dispute after statutory shop hours ended. In publik he described July stoppages in his district at Karstadt, Kaufhof, H&M and the Wittwer bookshop, the first strikes of more than one day at H&M on Königstraße, and a first full-day strike at two OBI stores outside the employers' association. In October 2009 publik carried his report that more than 400 municipal and hospital employees had protested a hiring freeze at the city hall, and that more than 100 cleaners from Klinikum Stuttgart had opposed moving cleaning into a firm outside public-sector agreements. He wrote that the spin-off was dropped, a staff-council agreement extended to 2016, and the cleaners kept on the hospital payroll at agreed rates.

He later said daily strike meetings begun in Stuttgart's public sector had been copied elsewhere, including at Telekom. publik reported a membership gain in the district in 2011 and further growth through May 2012, and quoted a Stuttgarter Zeitung portrait calling hardly any district better organized or more often in dispute. The taz noted his contacts in social movements and a network of critical colleagues he had organized from the late 1990s. The day before the Göttingen congress, it wrote, he still had to accept the break-up of Schlecker as district manager; on 2 June 2012 Die Linke elected him co-chair, and the district board was to name a successor in early July.

WASG and state politics in Baden-Württemberg

Protests against Agenda 2010

Agenda 2010, the labour-market and welfare programme of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s coalition of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and Alliance 90/The Greens, cut the remaining ties between parts of the trade-union left and the SPD. Riexinger was then managing director of the Stuttgart district of ver.di. A dpa portrait published when he stood for the federal leadership in 2012 recorded that Agenda 2010 finally alienated him from the SPD, that he helped initiate protest against what he regarded as social cuts, and that he soon afterwards founded a Baden-Württemberg branch of the Wahlalternative Arbeit und soziale Gerechtigkeit (WASG) with others of the same view.

The sharpest dispute was the Hartz legislation. The Bundesrat approved Hartz IV on 9 July 2004, merging unemployment benefit and social assistance from 1 January 2005. In eastern cities, Monday demonstrations recalling those of autumn 1989 ran from August into October. On 9 August more than 20,000 people protested nationwide, including a march in Rostock.

Monday demonstration against the Hartz IV reforms in Rostock, 9 August 2004.

In the west the same opposition became a party. The Süddeutsche Zeitung dated the WASG association to 2004, as a gathering of union officials and frustrated SPD members—former SPD chair Oskar Lafontaine sympathized openly—and the party’s formal founding to a congress in Göttingen on 22 January 2005. In Baden-Württemberg that milieu built the state association. Before the 2006 state election the taz listed Riexinger on the WASG state executive, still ver.di’s Stuttgart district manager, and Roland Hamm, IG Metall plenipotentiary in Aalen, as a founding figure in the southwest. The state association then had about 2,250 members, of roughly 12,000 nationwide; IG Metall officials Klaus Ernst and Thomas Händel sat on the federal executive.

The best-known recruit in the state was Ulrich Maurer, SPD state chair from 1987 to 1999 and long-time leader of its group in the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg. On 27 June 2005 Der Spiegel reported that, after 35 years, he was leaving. His resignation letter accused Schröder of a “putsch from above”. He was to join the WASG, which would constitute its state association in Stuttgart the following Saturday, and he meant to keep his Landtag seat—potentially the party’s first state deputy. Spiegel expected him to head the list for the early Bundestag election. In September 2005 the Party of Democratic Socialism, renamed the Linkspartei, and the WASG stood on joint open lists. In Baden-Württemberg that list took 3.8 percent.

State spokesperson and the merger into Die Linke

By the 2006 Landtag campaign Riexinger was spokesperson of the WASG state executive while still running the ver.di district. He told the taz that the split was “90 percent ver.di, 10 percent campaign, 18 hours a day”, and that he kept the roles apart. Public-sector workers were then striking against longer hours. For the WASG he said the party backed the strikers; as a union official he noted that the employers’ lead negotiator was Mannheim’s Social Democratic mayor, Gerhard Widder. Polls put the WASG near 3 percent. At the election it received 3.1 percent and no seats.

The merger had its own calendar. On 2 April 2006, 78.3 percent of participating WASG members voted to join the Linkspartei, and the WASG congress in Ludwigshafen on 29 April confirmed that course after a disputed debate. On 25 March 2007 a double congress in Dortmund approved the merger treaty, with 87.7 percent of WASG delegates and 96.9 percent of Linkspartei delegates in favour. The successor was Die Linke. Riexinger, already on the state WASG executive, became a state spokesperson of the new party.

The organization grew without clearing the Landtag threshold. Die Linke took 7.2 percent in Baden-Württemberg at the 2009 Bundestag election, then 2.8 percent (139,700 votes) and no seats at the state election of 27 March 2011. A dpa profile in June 2012 said membership had doubled in five years under his leadership, to about 3,000, still without a southwestern breakthrough. At a state congress in Stuttgart that July, each candidate for the leadership received between 80 and 90 percent. Neues Deutschland reported that delegates did not blame the executive for the Landtag result, and that the state party had long avoided the public quarrels then visible nationally. Riexinger’s opening speech backed the federal executive’s draft programme and restated opposition to any use of the Bundeswehr. He remained the state’s party leader until 2 June 2012, when a federal congress in Göttingen elected him co-chair of Die Linke.

Federal co-chairmanship

Election in 2012 and re-elections

On 2 June 2012 a congress of Die Linke in Göttingen elected a new dual leadership after Gesine Lötzsch and Klaus Ernst, joint chairs since 15 May 2010. Lötzsch had resigned in April, citing her husband's illness. The first ballot was open only to women: Katja Kipping, a Bundestag member from Saxony, took 67.1 percent against Dora Heyenn, chair of the Hamburg group, on 29.3 percent. In the second ballot Bernd Riexinger, then chair in Baden-Württemberg, beat the eastern reformer Dietmar Bartsch by 297 votes to 251 (53.5 percent to 45.2). Reports cast him as the candidate of the left trade-union wing around Oskar Lafontaine. Supporters sang the Internationale; Riexinger said he would speak first with delegates who had voted against him. Sahra Wagenknecht then declined to stand, saying she did not want to push the polarization further.

Katja Kipping and Bernd Riexinger during a June 2012 interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, shortly after their election as co-chairs.

They were returned without opponents, on two-year terms, three times, with falling shares. On 10 May 2014 in Berlin, Riexinger received 89.69 percent and Kipping 77.25 percent. At Magdeburg on 28 May 2016 the figures were 78.5 percent for Riexinger (434 of 553 delegates) and 74 percent for Kipping (392 of 530). In Leipzig on 9 June 2018 they were 73.8 percent and 64.46 percent.

The federal statute says no party office should be held by the same member for longer than eight years, a recommendation rather than an automatic bar. On 29 August 2020, a day after Kipping, Riexinger wrote that he would not stand at a congress then set for Erfurt from 30 October to 1 November. He said the party had been in a "risky" state when they took office and that their task had been to unify it. That meeting was later cancelled because of the coronavirus, so the handover slipped into 2021. At a digital congress on 26–27 February, nearly nine years after Göttingen, neither stood. Riexinger's farewell on 26 February called for a fight for social justice in the pandemic; Kipping urged openness to joining a federal government. On 27 February delegates elected Janine Wissler, unopposed, with 448 of 532 votes (84.2 percent), and Susanne Hennig-Wellsow with 387 of 536 (70.5 percent); two men on her list received 104 and 15 votes. The online result still required a postal ballot. It was reported as the party's first all-women dual leadership.

Party strategy and internal currents

Since the merger that created Die Linke, the party has used a dual chair, and its statute calls for bodies to be at least half women; the arrangement also balanced east and west and rival camps. The Federal Agency for Civic Education describes a spectrum from reform groupings, including the Forum Demokratischer Sozialismus, to a more orthodox camp of the Communist Platform, the Anticapitalist Left and the Socialist Left (Sozialistische Linke), a trade-union-oriented current, with the Emancipatory Left in between. Above a size threshold, recognized groupings may send congress delegates. Riexinger's 2012 majority was read as a win for Lafontaine's left trade-union wing over Bartsch's reformers. At Göttingen, Bundestag-group leader Gregor Gysi spoke of hatred in the group and said a split would be better than a ruined alliance of the wings; Lafontaine rejected talk of a split and said offers of cooperation to the Social Democratic Party in Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia had been refused.

Kipping and Riexinger presented the chair as a moderating office. In 2014 Riexinger ruled out foreign deployments of the Bundeswehr and any softening of positions to enter coalitions, and called for an end to Hartz IV and for redistribution; Kipping argued that the European Union should leave NATO. The Bundestag group stayed a second power center. Wagenknecht and Bartsch succeeded Gysi at its head in 2015 and, before the 2017 election, said they would be lead candidates only as a pair. The executive around Kipping and Riexinger answered that the party would decide, and did not exclude a membership vote. The compromise made Wagenknecht and Bartsch the lead candidates and put the two chairs on a four-person team, with federal manager Matthias Höhn running the campaign. The Kipping–Wagenknecht rivalry, the civic-education agency later wrote, badly strained party and group.

Migration was the sharpest later dispute. Into 2018 Kipping and Wagenknecht argued in public over whether Germany should be open to refugees in principle or only conditionally. Leipzig adopted the chairs' lead motion: fight causes of flight, including by stopping arms exports; a "social offensive" so housing and jobs would not become a distributional struggle; and safe routes with open borders for people seeking protection. Kipping asked Wagenknecht to accept the vote. When Wagenknecht and Lafontaine launched Aufstehen, Riexinger told taz in August 2018 that he was "already collected" by Die Linke, that an email list was not organizing, and that Wagenknecht had not debated the project in the executive. He pointed instead to campaigns with unions on nursing and rents.

Election campaigns

For the 2013 Bundestag election, Der Spiegel reported in January that Gysi would be the sole lead candidate after resisting an equal ticket with Wagenknecht, and that Kipping wanted a supporting team including Wagenknecht, herself, Bartsch and Jan van Aken. The official result was 8.6 percent of second votes (3,755,699), down 3.3 points from 2009, and 64 seats, twelve fewer — ahead of the Greens on 8.4 percent.

In June 2015 Riexinger said he would head the March 2016 Landtag list in Baden-Württemberg with the Mannheim councillor Gökay Akbulut. He argued that Minister-President Winfried Kretschmann's green-red government spoke of business, not of shop and industrial workers, and that the state needed a left opposition in the Landtag. Die Linke took 156,240 votes, 2.91 percent, up from 2.80 percent in 2011, and again missed the five-percent threshold.

Before the 2017 federal election Riexinger said the aim was a double-digit share and "neither a government campaign nor a purely opposition campaign." The official result was 9.2 percent of second votes (4,297,270), up 0.6 points, and 69 seats, five more than in 2013 — short of that target.

Member of the Bundestag

Mandates in 2017 and 2021

Riexinger entered the Bundestag for Die Linke at the election of 24 September 2017. A state party congress in Stuttgart placed him first on the Baden-Württemberg Landesliste, with the sitting member Heike Hänsel second; the state organisation then had five Bundestag members, and its business manager had named six seats as the target. He also stood in constituency 259, Stuttgart II. Die Linke took 12,321 first votes there, 8.9 percent, 3.9 points more than in 2013, while the CDU won the seat with 33.5 percent. He was returned on the state list, in first place, not by the constituency. Nationally the party received 9.2 percent of second votes and 69 seats; in Baden-Württemberg it received 380,727 second votes, 6.4 percent.

At the election of 26 September 2021 he again headed the Baden-Württemberg list and changed constituency, standing in 258, Stuttgart I, rather than Stuttgart II. Die Linke received 6,447 first votes in Stuttgart I, 4.1 percent, down 2.4 points; the Greens won the seat with 39.9 percent. The party’s second-vote share in the state fell to 196,874 votes, 3.3 percent. Nationally Die Linke fell to 4.9 percent of second votes. Under the basic-mandate rule then still in force, a party below the five-percent threshold was admitted to the proportional allocation if it won at least three constituencies: Die Linke won three direct seats and was given 36 further list seats, 39 in all. In the final distribution, after the partial repeat of the election in Berlin, three of those seats were allotted to Baden-Württemberg, where the party had won no constituency. Riexinger again entered from list place one.

He did not stand in 2025. The Stuttgarter Zeitung reported in January that he would not sit in the next Bundestag, and that Luigi Pantisano, long his aide in constituency work, and state chair Sahra Mirow would lead the new state list. The 20th electoral term ended when the 21st Bundestag held its constituent sitting on 25 March 2025.

Committees and legislative focus

In the 19th Bundestag the archived biography lists Riexinger only as a substitute member of the Finance Committee, the Committee for Economic Affairs and Energy, and the third committee of inquiry. He later said that, because he was still party chair, he had held back from specialist parliamentary work. His stated aim on entering the house was to tie the Bundestag group more closely to the party and to end the running rivalry between the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus and the group leadership of Dietmar Bartsch and Sahra Wagenknecht; he told the Stuttgarter Zeitung that he had managed this only to a limited extent and that conflicts continued. He described the 4.9 percent of autumn 2021 as a result he had not expected.

In the 20th electoral term the same archive, which identifies him with the later Gruppe Die Linke, lists him as a full member and Obmann—the group’s lead member—of the Transport Committee (Verkehrsausschuss). His recorded plenary interventions centred on fares and the financing of local and regional public transport. On 9 February 2023, debating the amendment of the Regionalisation Act that was to fund the flat-rate ticket later known as the Deutschlandticket, he said that a 49-euro ticket “goes in the right direction, but is a long way from a mobility transition,” and accused the FDP-led transport ministry of blocking the coalition’s climate targets while road-building continued. He called an extra billion euros in regionalisation funds a poor return once inflation was taken into account, and argued for cheaper social tickets rather than income tests at the point of sale.

Parliamentary group split

On 6 December 2023 the Die Linke parliamentary group dissolved. It had had 38 members; after several departures it no longer reached the minimum of 37, five percent of the 736-seat 20th Bundestag, and it entered liquidation. Every former member, Riexinger included, thereby became fraktionslos, a non-attached deputy. Non-attached members kept a constitutional right to speak in the plenary, could move points of order, put written and oral questions to the government, and table amendments at second reading. In one committee they could sit only as advisory members, with the right to speak and to move motions but not to vote, so that they would not outweigh the groups that had sent full members.

The 28 deputies who remained with Die Linke had already applied on 1 December 2023 to Bundestag president Bärbel Bas for recognition as a parliamentary Gruppe; the ten who left, and who formed the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, applied on 12 December. On 2 February 2024 the Bundestag, following the Council of Elders, recognised both Gruppe Die Linke, with 28 members, and a BSW group of ten. The SPD, the Greens and the FDP voted in favour; the CDU/CSU and the AfD voted against. Riexinger’s biography records him as non-attached from 6 December 2023 and as a member of Gruppe Die Linke from 2 February 2024. The groups could again send full and substitute members to committees, introduce bills and motions, and table up to ten major or minor interpellations a month. They received half the basic public funding of a Fraktion, including the opposition supplement, and a procedural motion of theirs needed the support of at least 37 deputies.

Political positions

Labour and the welfare state

Riexinger centred labour regulation in a “verbindende Klassenpolitik”. In January 2018 he rejected the claim that Die Linke had “lost the working class”. That class, he wrote, was everyone selling their labour without an entrepreneurial role—more female, more migrant and more precarious than before. Agenda 2010 had enlarged the low-wage sector so core staff and precarious workers could be played off against each other; the task was to organise interests they shared.

With Klaus Ernst he called this a “Neues Normalarbeitsverhältnis”: a statutory minimum wage of €12, without exceptions and rising at least with productivity and prices, so part-time work would not mean old-age poverty; abolition of agency work, or until then equal pay plus 10 per cent and takeover after three months; fixed terms only in narrow cases; and a “short full-time” of 28 to 35 hours under a 40-hour ceiling. At a 2018 Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung meeting, Neues Deutschland reported the campaign form as €12, no fixed terms and a selectable 22-to-35-hour week. IG Metall’s Hans-Jürgen Urban found the slogan weak but saw scope to work together on the law. In 2016 he called the coalition draft a “Wortbruch”: equal pay after nine months missed the majority who stayed only three months. In January 2020, against a legal €9.35, he moved to €13. DGB board member Stefan Körzell told the taz that 60 per cent of the median was about €12, and that employers would not take the larger step.

Unlike co-chair Katja Kipping, he rejected an unconditional basic income and stayed with the break from Hartz IV: in 2019 he opposed sanctions below subsistence and preferred living wages, shorter paid hours and a needs-based minimum without sanctions. On Deutschlandfunk he called the €424 rate far too low; the “System der Bestrafung”, he said, pushed people into undeclared work. In March 2020 he proposed a 5 per cent levy on private wealth from €1 million, with a €5 million allowance for business assets, which the party put at about €80 billion. In July he told ARD that pensioners, the unemployed and employees should not pay for the pandemic. System Change then linked a levy of at least 10 per cent, and about €80 billion a year from wealth above €1 million, to a left Green New Deal.

Climate, economy and transport

A March 2020 paper in Luxemburg cast the deal as Linke policy: a “soziale, ökologische und demokratische Transformation” of the car industry, not a new drivetrain in the export model. Firms were defending SUVs—Daimler was also funding fuel cells—while passing overcapacity, the diesel scandal and electrification to workers and suppliers. It was not a separate Baden-Württemberg programme; he wrote it from Stuttgart about that industry. He wanted free public transport within five years, lower rail fares, €9 billion a year for track and punctuality, no new roads, car-free centres by 2025, and limits of 30 km/h in towns and 120 on motorways. Electric cars would not cut energy use if size and numbers held; from 2030 no new combustion car should be registered or exported. Jobs and pay were to be guaranteed, with about a million public posts on a week near 30 hours and a ceiling falling from 40 hours to 35 by 2030, drawing on reserves he put above €80 billion at Volkswagen. He treated an outside estimate of €1.5 to €2 trillion over ten years as the scale of that reconstruction.

On Stuttgart 21 he said he had opposed the scheme from the start. In 2021 he called it a “Schienenrückbauprojekt”: 16 tracks replaced by eight, too few for the Deutschlandtakt without further billions. Rail expansion fitted the terminus better; he backed “Umstieg 21” and called the project “ein Fass ohne Boden”.

Peace, Europe and migration

He read the 2011 Erfurt programme more strictly than some colleagues. In January 2014, after Stefan Liebich said only combat missions barred government—and that airlifts, UN blue helmets and, for him, action against genocide remained open—Riexinger told the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung the programme stood. He could “absolut ausschließen” a Bundeswehr war mission with Die Linke’s votes, and offered the SPD and the Greens talks on non-violent policy, not a looser limit.

After the invasion of Ukraine he called the attack unjustifiable, backed a ceasefire and withdrawal, and wrote that the party had wrongly thought the war impossible. He defended the Bundestag group’s refusal to tie aid to the €100 billion Bundeswehr fund or to arms exports. Ukraine had a right to self-defence, he wrote, but weapons risked a longer war and German involvement; sanctions on oligarchs were his alternative to refusing sanctions outright. NATO enlargement—“kein Friedensbündnis”—was fair criticism only if not used to excuse the war. He also noted distrust of the party for what he called a partly real failure to criticise Russia.

On the European Union he attacked austerity and the euro, but not the exit urged by Sahra Wagenknecht and Oskar Lafontaine. In 2015 he told Die Welt she was right that the euro strengthened the strong and that the European Central Bank had pressed Athens, yet leaving did not follow: the problems were “nicht allein über die Währungsfrage zu lösen”. He wanted an “Ausgleichsunion”, investment, social floors and coordinated wages. In October 2016 he rejected “National-Keynesianismus” and a return to national currencies. The left should be a “dritter Pol” “für eine Neugründung Europas von unten”—European unemployment insurance, shorter hours, control of the ECB, taxes on the very rich, a parliament over the Commission—with “keine Abkürzungen über die Währungsfrage”.

Asylum was the sharper break with Wagenknecht. In January 2017 he wrote that the Linke group alone had consistently voted against tighter asylum laws and had rejected caps—“Fluchtursachen bekämpfen statt Geflüchtete”. Merkel’s responsibility for terrorism lay in arms exports, not refugee policy: Germany had “kein Flüchtlingsproblem, sondern ein Problem mit der wachsenden sozialen Ungerechtigkeit.” He answered with a “sozial gerechte Einwanderungsgesellschaft”: a €12 wage, 300,000 jobs for the long-term unemployed and refugees, 250,000 social homes a year, and a 5 per cent millionaires’ tax of about €80 billion.

Publications and public interventions

Books

Riexinger’s longer texts grew out of union work and later party strategy. With Werner Sauerborn he published Gewerkschaften in der Globalisierungsfalle. Vorwärts zu den Wurzeln! (VSA-Verlag, Hamburg, 2004, 38 pages). With Matthias W. Birkwald he set out pension proposals in Solidarische Mindestrente statt Altersarmut (VSA, 2015) and Die Gesetzliche Rente stärken und eine Solidarische Mindestrente einführen (VSA, 2017), the latter as the concept of Die Linke and its Bundestag group. With Lia Becker he issued For the many, not the few: Gute Arbeit für Alle! Vorschläge für ein Neues Normalarbeitsverhältnis (VSA, 2017, 61 pages), rejecting both the postwar male-breadwinner norm and the post-Agenda 2010 low-wage market in favour of living wages, permanent contracts, shorter full-time hours and wider co-determination.

Neue Klassenpolitik. Solidarität der Vielen statt Herrschaft der Wenigen (VSA, Hamburg, 2018; catalogues record 158 pages) turned that programme into an inclusive class concept and a “verbindende Klassenpolitik.” Drawing on his years as ver.di district manager in Stuttgart, it treats service-sector, precarious, women and migrant workers as part of a changed working class, and argues that common interests appear in collective struggles rather than in a return to an industrial male core. Mario Candeias, in Neues Deutschland, treated the strike narratives as analysis rather than anecdote. Christopher Wimmer, reviewing several 2018 titles in die tageszeitung, noted that the debate had reached party politics and asked how new the approach was.

The 2020 VSA Flugschrift System Change. Plädoyer für einen linken Green New Deal appeared as he prepared to leave the co-chair. Uwe Kalbe, in nd, described a six-point “new societal project,” including “Infrastruktursozialismus” and public investment of at least €1.5–2 trillion over ten to fifteen years, and found the account thorough but optimistic about how easily change could be won. Ulrich Brand, in Zeitschrift Luxemburg, called it a useful survey of left proposals but criticised a thin international dimension. Christian Zeller, in Sozialistische Zeitung, rejected a left Green New Deal as strategy and noted that the text had been prepared with Becker, Katharina Dahme and Christina Kaindl. An English edition, A Left Green New Deal: An Internationalist Blueprint, naming the four as co-authors, appeared in 2021 from Monthly Review Press.

In September 2024 the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung published Was ist Sozialismus heute? Warum wir den Kapitalismus überwinden müssen, a 40-page brochure written with Raul Zelik and meant to reopen debate on what socialism can mean. Thies Gleiss, in SoZ, recommended it against a left reduced to modest day-to-day reform.

Essays and media

In Jacobin, “The Connective Party” (2017) argued that socialist parties must build working-class power rather than wait for elections; a 2014 interview there discussed strategy. Luxemburg has carried comments on party renewal and the war in Ukraine, including a 2022 objection to Sahra Wagenknecht’s project. With Kaindl he restated the case in PROKLA (2022), “Verbindende Klassenpolitik und Klimagerechtigkeit,” after Die Linke’s weak Bundestag result. Guest pieces in the Frankfurter Rundschau have covered working time, climate and pensions. A June 2012 Süddeutsche Zeitung conversation, “Ich war nie ein Zögling von Lafontaine,” is a fuller early portrait of his union background and his distance from Oskar Lafontaine.

Later activities

Departure from the chair and from parliament

Riexinger and Katja Kipping did not stand again as co-chairs of Die Linke. On 27 February 2021 a federal party congress elected Janine Wissler and Susanne Hennig-Wellsow to succeed them.

He remained a member of the Bundestag for the rest of the 20th legislative period. On 17 November 2024, reporting the nomination of Luigi Pantisano and Aynur Karlikli as the Stuttgart candidates of Die Linke, the Stuttgarter Zeitung stated that the former party chair would not run again. In an interview published on 2 January 2025 he confirmed that he would not sit in the next parliament. He said he would advise the state executive in Baden-Württemberg, remain on the board of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, and return to grassroots work in southern Stuttgart, where Pantisano, his longtime constituency aide, and state chair Sahra Mirow were to lead the state list. The seat ended when the 21st Bundestag was constituted on 25 March 2025. In the interview he called the break with Sahra Wagenknecht much too late, and said the party should not have given up the role of a protest party, especially in the east, or left the question of peace to her.

Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung

On 29 November 2025 a members' assembly in Berlin elected Riexinger chair of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, the political foundation affiliated with Die Linke, in succession to Heinz Bierbaum. He defeated Jan Korte by 58 votes to 51.

Founded in Berlin in 1990, it is a non-profit financed mainly by public subsidies; DIE STIFTUNG reported 2024 income above €74 million and 294 staff. Riexinger had been an ordinary board member since 26 November 2022, when the assembly elected Bierbaum to succeed Dagmar Enkelmann, with Lena Saniye Güngör and Korte as deputies and Daniela Trochowski confirmed as executive director.

The 2025 vote was unusually contested. Bierbaum, chair since 2022 and a former president of the Party of the European Left, had planned a joint chair with Gesine Lötzsch. After the meeting rejected a dual chairmanship, both withdrew and Korte stood. Heike Werner, a former minister for labour, social affairs, health, women and family in Thuringia, was elected the full-time executive board member with 59 votes to Trochowski's 46. Güngör remained deputy chair. Barbara Höll, elected to the second deputy post, declined it, so that seat was left for a by-election. The thirteen-member board, chosen for three years, is unpaid except for the executive member.

nd and the taz connected the contest to finances and direction. After Die Linke's 4.9 percent in 2021, cuts in state funding and job losses had been expected; the stronger result in February 2025 eased that pressure. The taz reported discontent over how the outgoing leadership had handled the crisis, and criticism that Bierbaum's line was too traditionally left-wing. Party co-chair Ines Schwerdtner said she was glad for those elected and wished the new leadership well.

Riexinger said he wanted the foundation to become "an important point of attraction" for trade unionists, activists in left-wing social movements and left-wing intellectuals. He described the government of Friedrich Merz as mounting a "general attack on the welfare state" and said the foundation should offer social alternatives, analyses of "authoritarian capitalism" and strategies against a "fascization of politics and society," together with an education offensive aimed partly at young people.

Reception and controversies

Assessments of the co-chairmanship

On 2 June 2012, at a Die Linke congress in Göttingen, Katja Kipping won 67.1 percent on the women’s ballot. Bernd Riexinger, backed by the wing around Oskar Lafontaine, then beat the reformer Dietmar Bartsch by 53.5 to 45.2 percent. Der Spiegel later called the congress the traumatic peak of the fight between reformers and the party left, and noted that the pair were re-elected three times. Unopposed in May 2014, Kipping received 77.25 percent and Riexinger 89.69. By August 2020 the same magazine wrote that Riexinger no longer stood well in the party.

In that article Kevin Hagen called the record “stark durchwachsen” (strongly mixed). A 15 percent figure once named by Kipping was missed. Official second-vote shares were 8.6 percent in 2013, 3.3 points below the 11.9 percent of 2009, and 9.2 percent in 2017. In the old Länder and West Berlin the share fell from 8.3 percent in 2009 to 5.6 in 2013 and recovered only to 7.4 in 2017. Hagen set losses at the 2019 European election and in Saxony and Brandenburg against office in Berlin, Bodo Ramelow’s minister-presidency in Thuringia, and a first western coalition in Bremen. Membership, just under 61,000 at the end of 2019, was close to the total of eight years earlier, with younger urban gains offsetting an ageing east and prompting complaints of distance from workers and the unemployed. Conflict with Sahra Wagenknecht dominated, he wrote, while the old wings split.

Before the online congress of 26–27 February 2021 they described a party that was taken seriously, still critical of capitalism, and already in office in Thuringia, Berlin and a western state. Polls stood at 7 to 8 percent. The dpa account carried by the Süddeutsche Zeitung nevertheless described a lasting fight with Wagenknecht, who wanted a stricter migration policy and told Der Spiegel the party was elected more in fashionable districts than in Plattenbau estates, and should take low earners and workers seriously. Janine Wissler and Susanne Hennig-Wellsow were expected to follow. Kipping had already ruled out another candidacy, citing limited terms; the statute pointed toward eight years, and the congress had been delayed twice by the pandemic.

Public disputes

The sharpest dispute was a strategy conference in Kassel on 29 February–1 March 2020, with about 400 members.

Participants at the Die Linke strategy conference in Kassel, February–March 2020.

A Berlin member, Sandra L., said an energy transition would still be needed after a revolution, “auch wenn wir das eine Prozent der Reichen erschossen haben,” because people would still want heat and transport. Der Spiegel reported unease and took the line as not literal. From the platform Riexinger joked, “Wir erschießen sie nicht. Wir setzen sie schon für nützliche Arbeit ein” (“We will not shoot them. We will put them to useful work”). A clip of about 50 seconds spread.

He called her comment unacceptable and regretted not rejecting it at once. To the taz he said the party wanted peaceful, democratic change, apologised, and refused to resign. Sandra L. told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur the words were thoughtless, contradicted her views, and that she abhorred violence against people.

CSU general secretary Markus Blume said resignation was unavoidable. CDU general secretary Paul Ziemiak treated the episode as evidence against cooperation. On 6 March the Free Democratic Party obtained a Bundestag debate on Die Linke and the free democratic basic order. Linda Teuteberg said one does not joke about human dignity and spoke of a “tactical relationship to non-violence.” Christoph Bernstiel of the CDU ruled out cooperation for the foreseeable future and said the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution still watched official party structures. Ramelow, facing a vote on returning as Thuringia’s minister-president, wrote that talk of shooting people and of violent revolution was foreign to his values and should not have been smiled past. Group chairs Amira Mohamed Ali and Bartsch told Die Welt that anyone who wanted to shoot people, or who joked about forced labour, had left the shared set of values. Riexinger did not resign.