Cansu Özdemir

Cansu Özdemir (born 8 September 1988 in Hamburg) is a German politician of Die Linke. She was a member of the Hamburg Parliament from 2011 to 2025. The Bundestag biography lists her as chair of the Hamburg Left group from 2015 to 2025, and reporting from those years describes her as one of the group's two chairs. When the 21st Bundestag was constituted on 25 March 2025, she took a seat won on Hamburg's state list at the 2025 German federal election and became an ordinary member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Her Bundestag group lists her as its spokesperson for foreign policy.

Özdemir grew up in Osdorf, in western Hamburg, with Kurdish parents. NDR reported that her family had come to the city as guest workers and that this background, together with her Kurdish origin, shaped her politics. She passed the Abitur in 2009 at a Wirtschaftsgymnasium in Hamburg, studied political science without completing a degree, and worked in the social sector. In February 2020 the taz described her as still enrolled at the University of Hamburg, short of a statistics examination for a bachelor's degree in political science. A profile issued by her Bundestag group states that she also studied cultural anthropology there, that she joined Die Linke in 2009, and that she had been active from her teens in Kurdish and feminist campaigns. The taz's 2020 account places her party membership at about eleven years by that date.

At the federal election of 23 February 2025 she stood second on Die Linke's Hamburg list, behind Jan van Aken. She told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that she had taken the list place to support van Aken and had not expected to be elected. In Hamburg, Die Linke received 151,115 second votes (14.5 percent), 7.7 percentage points more than in 2021. She and van Aken both won seats from that list. She was also the Left's lead candidate for the 2025 Hamburg state election on 2 March, after a party congress the previous autumn nominated her with almost 90 percent of the vote. Die Linke took 11.2 percent of the state vote, 488,463 votes. On 6 March 2025 NDR reported that she had accepted the Bundestag mandate, would keep living on the Osdorfer Born estate where she had grown up, and that Stephan Jersch would succeed her in the Bürgerschaft.

In October 2019 the district court in Hamburg-Altona found her guilty under the associations statute for a November 2017 tweet that showed a flag of the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party beside a call to lift the ban. The court suspended a fine of 4,500 euros and required a 1,000-euro donation to a charity. The prosecution had asked for 40 daily rates of 100 euros, and both sides said they were considering an appeal. Welt noted that the party has been banned in Germany since 1993. The Bundestag biography, which reproduces members' own disclosures, states that she is married and has one child. NDR quoted her on the difficulty of the move to Berlin as the mother of a small child, and on her plan to commute rather than move the family.

Early life and education

Family and upbringing

Cansu Özdemir was born on 8 September 1988 in Hamburg-Altona, the daughter of Kurdish parents from Turkey and a grandchild of guest workers who had settled in Altona. Die Zeit has described her father as Sunni and her mother as an Alevi, and quoted her as saying she was raised to resist old role models and to live peaceably with people of other religions. During a 2015 visit to southeastern Turkey she told reporters that her father, Tekin Özdemir, had stayed until 1986 in Yeniköy, in the Beşiri district of Batman Province, and had met and married her mother, Özgül, in Germany; she said she was then living in Hamburg with her parents and three siblings. The Habertürk article that carried those remarks also misstated her age and wrongly described her as a member of the European Parliament.

She grew up at the Osdorfer Born, a large 1960s high-rise estate in the quarter of Osdorf. Her grandparents, whom she has called "classic guest workers," first lived on Stresemannstraße in Altona and later moved to the estate, as many Turkish families did, because there was more space and the flats were affordable. Walking through the neighbourhood for the Hamburger Morgenpost in 2023, she pointed to a low, pale-blue block where her grandparents' four-room flat at times held as many as twelve relatives. She recalled tension with Turkish right-wing residents who later left the area, said she had never felt poor, and described the childhood as largely happy and carefree, including afternoons on the playground by the church. On her mother's side, grandparents lived in a village about half an hour's drive from Malatya; as a six-year-old in 1994 she was in their house during a smaller earthquake that the building withstood. She has said the family was active in left-wing associations and that she was taken in a pushchair to demonstrations against human-rights violations in Turkey. NDR later reported that this Kurdish background, and the family's experience as guest workers in Hamburg, remained a point of political reference for her.

Schooling and studies

The Bundestag biography, which rests on members' own information, states that Özdemir passed the Abitur in 2009 at a Wirtschaftsgymnasium, a business-oriented secondary school, in Hamburg, then studied political science without completing a degree, and worked as an employee in the social sector. Her first-person profile for the Left group in the Bundestag also lists cultural anthropology at the University of Hamburg. In January 2020, when she was already a Hamburg state parliamentarian, Neues Deutschland still described her as a student of political science. An earlier biography on the Hamburg Left group's site likewise recorded the 2009 Abitur and political-science studies at the university, without a completed degree. No public source names the social-sector employer.

She dates organised activity to the age of 16, in youth, women's, peace and migration work. She has said that she became politicised in the Kurdish women's movement and helped organise campaigns against femicides, domestic violence and forced marriage, as well as protests against wars and violations of basic rights. She told Neues Deutschland that she entered party politics at 21 by interpreting for a Hamburg delegation of Die Linke in Kurdish regions of Turkey, and that the members' commitment to a peace policy led her to join them. Party biographies date that membership to 2009, the year of her Abitur.

Hamburg Bürgerschaft, 2011–2015

The 2011 election

Özdemir joined Die Linke in 2009. In an interview published by Hamburg's state agency for civic education, she said she had belonged briefly to the Social Democratic Party of Germany at 16 or 17, left after a few months, and from 2009 was intermittently active for the Left in Altona before standing for the Hamburg Parliament.

The election of 20 February 2011 was the first Hamburg state election under the electoral law introduced in 2009. Voters had five constituency votes and five state-list votes, and list votes could go to a party or to individual candidates. A share of each party's list seats, matching the share of its list votes cast for persons, went to the candidates with the most personal votes; the rest followed the party's list order.

Die Linke repeated its 2008 share: 6.4 percent of state-list votes (220,428) and eight of 121 seats, five from the list and three from constituencies. Turnout was 57.3 percent. The SPD, led by Olaf Scholz, won 48.4 percent and an absolute majority of 62 seats. The Christian Democratic Union fell to 21.9 percent and 28 seats, Alliance 90/The Greens — in Hamburg still the Green-Alternative List — took 11.2 percent and 14 seats, and the Free Democratic Party 6.7 percent and nine. A partial rerun on 15 May 2011 in constituency 17 was included in the final result and left the seat totals unchanged.

A Left delegate assembly in January had placed Özdemir ninth on the state list, too low to be elected on list order. Personal votes changed that. Counts published just after election day gave her 9,745, the second-highest personal total on the Left list after lead candidate Dora Heyenn; the official final figure, including the May rerun, was 9,778. She and Heike Sudmann (4,025) took the two list seats awarded by personal vote. Heyenn, Christiane Schneider and Kersten Artus took the list-order seats, and Joachim Bischoff, Mehmet Yildiz and Norbert Hackbusch the constituency seats. The taz called the 22-year-old's rise from ninth place the surprise on the Left list.

Born on 8 September 1988, she was 22. When the parliament met on 7 March 2011, senior member Jan Ehlers (SPD) named the two youngest members, Annkathrin Kammeyer (SPD) and Özdemir, provisional secretaries for the opening sitting. Özdemir later called herself the second-youngest member and said campaigning among Kurdish voters in Hamburg, many voting for the first time, had lifted her up the list.

Committee and spokesperson roles

The 2012–13 parliamentary handbook lists Özdemir among the eight members of the Left faction. By February 2012 the taz described her, then 23 and a student of cultural anthropology and political science, as the Left's spokesperson for social affairs and integration. She opposed public funding of the Matthiae-Mahl, the Senate's banquet for guests from politics, business and culture: the 2011 event had cost 87,762 euros, about 230 euros a guest, which she said could not be justified amid homelessness, a housing shortage and a widening social divide.

In November 2013 the taz still identified her as the faction's spokesperson for social affairs and integration. She said she had taken the integration brief because of her migration background and earlier work on the subject, while also covering social policy, and that she would have objected to being limited to migration. A portrait from the Hamburg Landeszentrale für politische Bildung in the same term called her spokesperson for integration, inclusion and social affairs and a member of the Committee for Social Affairs, Labour and Integration. In 2012–13 that 17-member committee was chaired by Katharina Fegebank of the Greens; the Left held one seat.

From the winter semester of 2011 she studied Volkskunde and political science at the University of Hamburg, later dropped Volkskunde, and continued political science while holding the seat. She said her first speech, at the parliament's second sitting, was on the integration advisory board.

She was re-elected on 15 February 2015. Die Linke rose to 8.5 percent of state-list votes (300,567) and 11 seats, seven from the list and four from constituencies. The SPD lost its absolute majority, with 45.6 percent and 58 of 121 seats; turnout was 56.5 percent. The CDU won 20 seats, the Greens 15, the FDP nine and the Alternative for Germany, new to the Bürgerschaft, eight. Özdemir again entered on personal votes, not a constituency seat: 12,794, second on the Left's state list behind Heyenn's 27,591.

Faction leadership, 2015–2025

Election as co-chair

On 1 March 2015 the deputies of Die Linke in the Hamburg Parliament elected Sabine Boeddinghaus and Cansu Özdemir co-chairs, in place of Dora Heyenn, who had led the group for years. Heyenn had stood and had not received the yes votes required to go on; a sounding of opinion then put Boeddinghaus and Özdemir first. Heike Sudmann became parliamentary business manager and Deniz Celik deputy chair. Neues Deutschland reported a debate about hierarchy in the group and quoted Norbert Hackbusch calling the switch a generational change rather than a contest for power. Boeddinghaus told Die Tageszeitung that a dual chair was not aimed at Heyenn and that offices in the party were not inherited; Heyenn then sat without a faction.

Secret ballots later returned both chairs. In February 2016 the Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported a unanimous confirmation. On 13 February 2017 the group recorded seven yes votes, two no votes and one abstention for Özdemir, and nine yes votes and one no for Boeddinghaus; the chairs called the no votes a reaction to their criticism of how individual deputies worked. On 19 February 2018 neither chair received a vote against—Özdemir eight yes and two abstentions, Boeddinghaus ten yes. On 2 February 2019 dpa reported another unanimous confirmation.

After the 2020 state election the executive was kept on for at most six months because of the coronavirus pandemic. On 24 August 2020 both were re-elected with nine yes votes, one abstention and three no votes. Celik did not stand again after becoming a vice-president of the Bürgerschaft; David Stoop joined Sudmann as a deputy chair. On the evening of 28 August 2023 the group said Boeddinghaus and Özdemir, in office since 2015, had again been re-elected unanimously. NDR still described Özdemir as the Left group's chair in its February 2025 HamburgTREND.

Standing in polls and the 2024 nomination

The HamburgTREND, commissioned by Norddeutscher Rundfunk and conducted by Infratest dimap, asks people eligible to vote in Hamburg about leading state politicians. NDR publishes the share who are "zufrieden" or "sehr zufrieden" with a politician's work; Infratest dimap's summaries speak of "Zuspruch" and of the share a politician "überzeugt".

In January 2020, before that year's state election, Infratest dimap called Özdemir the best-known and "vergleichsweise populärsten" opposition politician: 33 percent, down two points, against 22 percent for Heyenn five years earlier. Early in February 2020 the figure was 31 percent, again down two, and the same description was used. In that February report, 66 percent were satisfied with First Mayor Peter Tschentscher of the Social Democratic Party and 43 percent with Second Mayor Katharina Fegebank of Alliance 90/The Greens.

In the February 2024 wave—1,164 eligible voters, interviewed by telephone and online from 1 to 5 February—Infratest dimap wrote that of the opposition leaders she "schneidet … am besten ab," convincing 28 percent, six points below February 2020. Next were Dennis Thering of the Christian Democratic Union at 20 percent, Anna von Treuenfels of the Free Democratic Party at 13 percent and Dirk Nockemann of the Alternative for Germany at 10 percent. Tschentscher was at 55 percent and Fegebank at 36 percent. In November 2024, from 1,177 interviews, NDR said she led the opposition list at 26 percent, down two points from February, with Thering at 18 percent. In mid-January 2025 NDR put her at 28 percent, up two and still first on that list; it compared the result with 34 percent before the 2020 election, while Infratest dimap's early-February 2020 figure had been 31 percent. In the last pre-election wave, 29 January to 3 February 2025 (1,164 people; maximum margin about three points), 23 percent were satisfied or very satisfied with her work, down five points—ahead of Thering at 19 percent, and behind Tschentscher at 58 percent and Fegebank at 35 percent.

Party nomination votes were separate. On 20 October 2019 a state delegates' assembly placed her first on the list for the February 2020 election with 61 of 99 valid votes. On Saturday, 12 October 2024, delegates at the Bürgerhaus Wilhelmsburg again named her lead candidate, for the election of 2 March 2025. The state association published 89.2 percent for Özdemir in first place, 93.1 percent for Heike Sudmann in second and 88.2 percent for Sabine Ritter in third. A dpa report that weekend gave 89.6 percent and 92.5 percent for the first two places, and noted that Boeddinghaus had not stood.

Social policy, housing and the Olympic bids

Rents, care and public services

In the Hamburg Parliament, Cansu Özdemir was Die Linke's spokesperson for social affairs, inclusion, women and queer policy. With co-chair Sabine Boeddinghaus she set the faction's priorities from 2015 as refugee policy, socially balanced development, and poverty in Hamburg. She said a red-green senate under First Mayor Olaf Scholz neglected those questions. In 2019 she argued that the SPD–Green coalition was still unwilling to fight poverty or change rents, so Die Linke would campaign to stay in opposition.

Housing was the recurring demand. When the winter emergency programme ended in March 2016, she told the taz that more than 1,000 people would again sleep outside because year-round places, including the Pik As men's hostel, were too few. The social authority warned that expanding it would pull people into the city. Özdemir called that "nonsense" and said users came because they found neither a flat nor work. Die Linke rejected the senate's Drittelmix—one-third owner-occupied, one-third private rental and one-third social housing—and asked for social homes to be half of new building. About €200 million a year set aside for an Olympic bid from 2017, she argued, could go into that stock.

In February 2025 she defended a rent cap as bringing excessive rents down to a level that still paid for maintenance and a return she called reasonable. The municipal landlord SAGA, she said, showed that a little over €7 a square metre could fund upkeep, about 1,000 new homes a year and surpluses of about €200 million. To critics who said a cap would deter building, she replied that many affected landlords had built nothing. Constituents, she said, also raised flat conditions, transport and overloaded offices.

She also questioned the senate on refuges and disability. In November 2020, during the second COVID-19 wave, she said there was no workable plan for women in Hamburg's shelters who tested positive or were suspected cases. The senate replied that, if beds were free, they could use quarantine sites for public accommodation, and that hotel talks were unfinished. Özdemir called that unserious, citing conditions that had closed a site in Rahlstedt. The senate reported 196 refuge places. In April 2023 she opened a committee debate on Die Linke inquiries into compensation for deaf people, describing the forced suppression of sign language in schools as an injustice still visible in limited language, lower pensions and poverty.

Opposition to Olympic candidacies

The taz described Die Linke as the only Bürgerschaft faction opposing a Hamburg bid for the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Özdemir said in June 2015 that the party opposed not the Olympic idea but "the real implementation". Boeddinghaus said the mayor cited the debt brake to refuse money for social policy, then treated the cost of the Games as immaterial.

On 29 November 2015 voters were asked whether the German Olympic Sports Confederation should bid with Hamburg. The final count was 336,518 no (51.6 percent) and 315,181 yes (48.4 percent), turnout 50.2 percent. Yes votes cleared a one-fifth quorum, but the proposal failed because no votes were more numerous, and the bid was withdrawn.

In July 2024, after a federal declaration of intent for a new German candidacy, First Mayor Peter Tschentscher said he could imagine a joint bid with Berlin for 2036 or 2040, preferably 2040. Hamburg would hold another referendum, he said, because a bid had to be carried by the public, and residents could be offered Games "not linked to enormously high costs and large construction projects". On 13 August Özdemir told NDR that Die Linke was "still firmly against". Policy of the International Olympic Committee, the tax cost and the 2015 vote were unchanged after Paris, she said, and she called it a mystery how that result could be "trampled underfoot".

The question returned on 31 May 2026, on a bid for 2036, 2040 or 2044 with Hamburg as host. A Bundestag research-service review commissioned by Özdemir found no necessary link between the Games and higher rents or house prices—prices held or fell in Atlanta in 1996 and Los Angeles in 1984—but said rises were possible where infrastructure made districts more attractive, and displacement more likely if nothing was done. Answering Die Linke, the red-green senate said a bid would not affect Hamburg rents. Özdemir called the Games "another building block" that could price hundreds of thousands of people out. The senate confirmed the result on 23 June 2026: 358,861 no (55.1 percent) and 292,705 yes (44.9 percent), turnout 49.6 percent. The proposal still failed. With the preliminary no share at 54.9 percent, Tschentscher said the vote bound the senate, withdrew the bid, and said he regretted the result.

The G20 summit and migration

The 2017 summit and the special committee

In November 2016 Sabine Boeddinghaus and Cansu Özdemir, co-chairs of the Die Linke group in the Hamburg Parliament, said Hamburg should not host the July 2017 G20 summit. They called the Group of Twenty an "illegitimate organization" whose powers should pass to the United Nations, and said the summit would put the city into a state of emergency. In May 2017, after interior senator Andy Grote of the Social Democratic Party warned that blocking leaders' motorcades could be fatal because foreign bodyguards were armed, Özdemir said civil disobedience must "under no circumstances" be met with gunfire.

Leaders met on 7 and 8 July. After the "Welcome to Hell" demonstration, the two chairs said the escalation had "without any doubt" come from the police, which they accused of attacking a peaceful march, causing a mass panic in a walled-off street and striking people who fled. They called the SPD–Green Senate's plan "designed for massive escalation." Police rejected the charge and said the situation had been close to becoming uncontrollable. Dozens were injured on both sides.

On 9 July they demanded a parliamentary inquiry into the venue, the police plan, curbs on basic rights and the "incomprehensible" violence. On 12 July, after a statement by mayor Olaf Scholz, Özdemir told the Bürgerschaft that destruction in the Schanze and other residential areas left her group aghast, and that endangering lives and looting had nothing to do with a fairer world. She accused commander Hartmut Dudde of accepting serious injuries and mass panics, and suggested the violence came less from left-wing extremists than from "thrill-seeking violent offenders."

The coalition created a 19-member special committee rather than an Untersuchungsausschuss able to compel evidence. Die Linke and the Alternative for Germany had wanted that stronger body; the CDU, the FDP and the governing parties did not. Welt reported that the Left warned the "disaster" would be buried in this "alibi event." In September 2017 Grote admitted police had blacked out files too aggressively. Özdemir said officers had also doubted Hamburg as a venue; Grote said he knew of none and told her to name what he called her secret sources. In June 2018 the Senate told Özdemir and Schneider that plainclothes officers had been in the Welcome to Hell march but would not say whether they had masked; an officer had testified to covering his face in the black bloc. The committee last met in August 2018 with no joint report. Schneider called it a wasted chance.

Refugee shelters

In early September 2015 activists told Die Linke that people they called Salafists had gathered outside the trade-fair emergency shelter, tried to approach young refugees and, turned away, torn down a screen to pass in Qurans. Özdemir said a witness identified one of them from "Lies!" photographs and called it "very dangerous" that people who had fled "this totalitarian ideology" were meeting it again. She said the Islamic State had urged followers to come to Europe partly by recruiting refugees. Hamburg's intelligence office counted about 460 Salafists in the city.

The Senate's answer of 15 September, to a question from Özdemir and Schneider dated 8 September, said helpers saw approaches on the 6th and Qurans passed through a fence on the 5th. Police had those people leave and had no finding that they were Salafists. Similar handouts were reported near Jenfelder Moorpark, and the Senate knew of no Salafists on shelter security staff. On 6 October Welt, citing another question from her, reported 65 departures from Hamburg to Iraq or Syria, about 13 of them women. She said approaches outside shelters were accumulating and that Yazidi, Christian and Muslim refugees felt threatened, describing women waiting outside the Rugenbarg shelter to offer clothes and help for a mosque visit. The intelligence service saw no centrally directed campaign. A year earlier at Schnackenburgallee she had relayed a Yazidi account of beheading threats and a Christian account of pressure to take down a cross.

Kurdish advocacy and association-law proceedings

The 2011 domestic-intelligence assessment

After the February 2011 state election, the Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz in Hamburg circulated a note titled "Extremistische Kandidaten und ihre Ergebnisse." Of Die Linke it wrote that one seat in the Hamburg Parliament had gone to a woman "die dem Umfeld der kurdischen Arbeiterpartei PKK zuzurechnen ist," attributable to the milieu of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, without naming her. The Hamburger Abendblatt identified Cansu Özdemir, then 22, from ninth place on the state list. The PKK has been banned in Germany since 1993 and is described in reporting as a terrorist organization.

Deputy group leader Christiane Schneider called the passage Rufmord ("character assassination"). It put Özdemir "close to a criminal offence," she said, and was "a criminalization and an endangerment of her person." The group said it would go to the parliamentary control committee, have the note reviewed in law, and would not accept being set, in that note, beside the NPD.

On 7 March 2011 she rejected the label "extremist candidate." The taz reported that she, born in Hamburg to Kurdish parents, had been in contact with political and civil-society institutions on visits to Kurdistan, and said the office was trying to bring her and those institutions "into disrepute."

Social-media cases and the 2019 warning

By 23 January 2015 the Hamburg public prosecutor's office was investigating her for sharing, on Facebook, a photograph of Bundestag members of Die Linke behind a PKK flag in a call to lift the ban. Christiane Schneider told the taz that, when even CDU politicians were discussing support for the PKK against the Islamic State, "the political absurdity of the PKK ban is obvious and lifting it is more than overdue." Welt reported that the investigation was discontinued after a short time.

On 27 November 2017 Özdemir posted a Deutsche Presse-Agentur photograph of a PKK flag with the text "Weg mit dem Verbot der #PKK! #ForbiddenInGermany" ("Away with the ban on the PKK"). A citizen's complaint produced a second investigation, which senior prosecutor Nana Frombach confirmed in March 2018. Co-chair Sabine Boeddinghaus called it excessive and said Die Linke shared the demand to lift the ban.

Newspapers quoted her on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the war in Syria. In a Welt am Sonntag exchange published on 1 August 2016, asked whether events in Turkey were the work of a democrat, she said: "No, for me Erdoğan is a dictator," and that Turkey had never been a democracy, under him or before him. On 13 March 2018 the taz quoted her on the offensive at Afrin: the investigation limited her freedom of opinion; she was "angry at the Turkish government and also at the federal government, which strengthens Erdoğan in his war contrary to international law"; and civilians there faced a massacre.

On 28 October 2019 Judge Katharina Leroye at the Amtsgericht Altona found her guilty under the Vereinsgesetz, which bars public use of a banned group's insignia. Welt, matching the taz hearing report, records a Verwarnung mit Strafvorbehalt: guilt, a warning, and a reserved penalty. Showing the flag again within two years would trigger 4,500 euros (30 daily rates of 150 euros); she was also to donate 1,000 euros to Hilfe für das behinderte Kind. Prosecutors, who had wanted a conviction and 4,000 euros (40 rates of 100), appealed, as did she. Leroye said she could follow much of the politics but had to apply the law: the slogan alone was lawful, the flag was not. A "civic education" exception (staatsbürgerliche Aufklärung) failed because she found the tweet "political day-to-day combat," though a heavier penalty was unnecessary and repetition unlikely.

In court Özdemir called the ban "hypocritical and an instrument of repression" against politically active Kurds and their comrades in Germany. She said the federal government had relied on Kurdish units against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq while arming Turkey, and that Kurds had been "systematically persecuted — always with the aim of assimilation and annihilation."

On 31 August 2020 the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court announced that the appeal at the Landgericht Hamburg had been discontinued against a payment of 2,250 euros. The trial set for the next day was cancelled, without an acquittal.

The 2021 departure stop

On 12 June 2021 Federal Police officers at Düsseldorf Airport stopped travelers bound for Erbil, in the Kurdistan Region. Der Spiegel reported the police account: 19 people checked and no arrests; 15 members of a self-described "peace delegation" barred from the Kurdish areas; four others, Özdemir included, not banned but too late for the flight. Police said she had not at first identified herself as a parliamentarian and had been cleared to go on. The taz later counted about 20 travelers from Hamburg and 16 one-month bans stamped in passports.

The Federal Ministry of the Interior, answering Left Bundestag member Niema Movassat, contradicted that account of Özdemir. It said she had not been questioned, held, or arrested, and had stayed at the police office, at her own request, until the others were finished. She told Spiegel she had identified herself at once, was not believed, was escorted to the lavatory and outside to smoke, and had her passport taken. She called the stop unlawful and said she would complain of false imprisonment and coercion. Düsseldorf prosecutors later rejected that complaint.

Officers relied on the passport law, which allows an exit to be refused if security or other significant interests of the Federal Republic are endangered. The stated suspicion, as the taz reported it, was support for the PKK — listed by the European Union, that paper noted, but not by the United Nations, as a terrorist organization — and use as "human shields" against Turkish attacks. Die Linke said the trip was to learn about Turkish operations in northern Iraq. Özdemir said she was told the cordon was "an order from above," which she attributed to the interior or foreign ministry and a wish not to anger Erdoğan. About 50 people, including Berlin Left member Hakan Taş, were also turned back in Erbil; the regional interior ministry told dpa the PKK was trying to destabilize the city.

Özdemir had received no formal ban and could not sue. On 28 August 2024 the Verwaltungsgericht Köln held the bans on Ronja H. and Theda O. unlawful. Mere suspicion of a human-shield plan was not enough, and alleged recruitment of European youth did not apply to Theda O., already 70 in 2021; both plaintiffs had called the claim unrealistic. Özdemir called the ruling "very positive." Die Linke said it showed federal policy "unlawfully rolling out the red carpet" for Erdoğan and thereby supporting "an Islamist dictator."

The 2025 elections

The federal list and the Hamburg result

The 2025 German federal election was held on 23 February 2025. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier had dissolved the 20th Bundestag on 27 December 2024, under Article 68 of the Basic Law, and set the election for that date. In Hamburg, Cansu Özdemir stood second on the state list of Die Linke, behind Jan van Aken. She described the place as one she had taken as a Zählkandidatin—a candidate not expected to be elected—in order to support van Aken, the party's lead candidate. The day after the vote she said that, when she had stood for second place, an outcome that would give her a seat had seemed beyond what was possible, and that she still had to discuss the situation with her family. NDR later reported that the party had for a long time feared missing the five-percent threshold altogether.

The final Hamburg figures published by the Federal Returning Officer give 1,299,289 people eligible to vote and a turnout of 80.9 percent, 3.0 points above 2021. Die Linke received 151,115 second votes, equal to 14.5 percent and a gain of 7.7 points; its first-vote share was 12.5 percent. Nationally the party won 8.8 percent of second votes, up 3.9 points, and 64 seats, 25 more than in 2021. In Hamburg the result produced two list seats and no constituency seat. The six Hamburg constituencies went to three candidates of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), two of Alliance 90/The Greens and one of the Christian Democratic Union. The two Left seats were filled from the state list by van Aken, in first place, and Özdemir, in second; the Alternative for Germany likewise received two Hamburg list seats.

The state election and the choice of mandate

The election to the Hamburg Parliament, the Bürgerschaft, followed on 2 March 2025. Özdemir was the Left's lead candidate, chosen at a party congress the previous autumn with almost 90 percent of the vote, a larger margin than the roughly 60 percent she had received for the same role five years earlier. She continued to campaign with Heike Sudmann as a lead-candidate pair, and said she would spend the final week of the state campaign in Hamburg alongside Sudmann.

In the final result compiled by the Statistical Office for Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein, Die Linke received 488,463 votes on the state list, 11.2 percent of valid list votes, up 2.1 points from 9.1 percent in 2020. It won 15 of the 121 seats, two more than in 2020. Of those elected, nine entered through constituency lists and six through the state list. Sudmann was elected on the list for constituency 3 (Altona) with 60,831 personal votes; Özdemir was returned in first place on the state list. Turnout was 67.6 percent of 1,313,043 eligible voters. The SPD remained the largest party, with 33.5 percent and 45 seats, ahead of the CDU on 19.8 percent and 26 seats, the Greens on 18.5 percent and 25 seats, and the AfD on 7.5 percent and 10 seats. The SPD and the Greens together held 70 seats; the SPD and the Left together held 60.

Between the two elections, First Mayor Peter Tschentscher said he was not considering cooperation with the Left. He said the party had, in Hamburg more clearly than in almost any other state, declared that it did not want to govern, and he warned that gains for the Left could weaken the Greens enough that a two-party alliance would no longer be enough. Özdemir, quoted by Die Welt on 26 February, replied that the Left had never said it was closed to talks. She said the decisive points were policies, including action against poverty, lower rents and an inquiry into the National Socialist Underground, and that Tschentscher was warning of unstable conditions because he did not want to carry out Left measures.

On 6 March 2025 NDR reported that Özdemir had decided to accept the Bundestag mandate after several days of deliberation. She said there had been many sleepless nights and that the choice had been difficult as the mother of a small child, but that other women with children had encouraged her to take it. She said she would not move to Berlin with her family and would stay in Osdorfer Born, where she had grown up. Stephan Jersch, described by NDR as a long-standing environmental politician who had not at first won enough votes to remain in the Bürgerschaft, was to succeed her there. Van Aken also entered the Bundestag from Hamburg.

Bundestag membership and foreign policy

Committee seat and spokesperson role

After fourteen years in the Hamburg Parliament, the last ten of them as chair of the Die Linke group, Cansu Özdemir took her seat when the 21st Bundestag was constituted on 25 March 2025. She was elected on the state list of Hamburg, and the Bundestag biography lists her as an ordinary member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs. The committee was constituted on 21 May 2025 and chose Armin Laschet of the Christian Democratic Union as chair. It has 42 ordinary members, four from Die Linke: Jan van Aken, Vinzenz Glaser, Özdemir and Lea Reisner.

NDR reported on 4 June 2025 that she had been elected foreign-policy spokesperson of the Left group in the Bundestag, responsible for North Africa, the Near and Middle East, and China. The same day the Foreign Affairs Committee, with Özdemir as the Left rapporteur, recommended extending Germany's part in the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon.

Debates on deployments, Syria and Afghanistan

In paper 21/229 the federal government asked to keep up to 300 Bundeswehr personnel in UNIFIL until 30 June 2026. It described Lebanon as more stable after a new government took office in February 2025, but said support for the Lebanese forces, including UNIFIL monitoring and training, was still essential amid economic crisis, Hezbollah, and fighting with Israel paused by a United States-brokered ceasefire on 27 November 2024. On 4 June the CDU/CSU, the Social Democratic Party and Alliance 90/The Greens backed the recommendation; the Alternative for Germany and Die Linke opposed it.

In the 14th sitting, on 26 June 2025, Özdemir argued that after 19 years the problems were too complex for a military solution, that arms smuggling had not been stopped, and that German arms exports into the region made the mission what she called symbolic policy. She cited Lebanese groups such as KAFA and Nasawiya, which she said rejected using women's rights to justify security policy. The final roll-call was 390 in favour, 179 against and two abstentions, on 571 votes cast; the mandate was renewed. Özdemir voted no with the Left group.

On 17 September 2025, debating the Federal Foreign Office budget (Einzelplan 05), Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul defended spending on the European Union, the United Nations and engagement where, he said, need, hunger and flight begin. He said Britain, France and Germany were obliged to keep Iran from nuclear weapons, in Germany's, the region's and Israel's interest. Özdemir answered that she did not see the "values-led foreign policy" the government invoked. She treated contacts with the Taliban, which she linked to deportations from Afghanistan, support for Ahmed al-Sharaa's transitional government in Syria, and oil and arms deals with Saudi Arabia as a double standard, and contrasted condemnation of Russia's attack on Ukraine with what she called relative quiet over Israeli violations of international law. A credible policy, she told Wadephul, would not cut peace and development spending. The CDU/CSU and SPD adopted the estimate against the AfD, the Greens and Die Linke.

The 37th sitting, on 6 November 2025, took three AfD motions: ending Afghan admission programmes (paper 21/1551), a "new realpolitik" with a liaison office in Kabul and organized returns (21/2541), and a treaty so convicted Afghans could serve German sentences in Afghanistan (21/2542). The house rejected the first, with every group except the AfD voting for the Interior Committee's recommendation to do so; the other two were referred to committee. Özdemir said there should be neither normalization of nor negotiation with the Taliban. She argued that girls were barred from school and that women and queer people were being removed from public life, called the contacts a moral bankruptcy, and asked how the shift could be explained to soldiers previously sent against the Taliban. Stephan Mayer (CDU/CSU) said an AfD-style treaty would place Germany with Russia, which in his account had taken up relations with the Taliban in July 2025. The government would not recognize the regime, he said, but technical talks were in the German interest if about 12,000 Afghans obliged to leave, and unwilling to go voluntarily, were to be removed.

On 19 December 2025, a year after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, the 51st sitting debated a Green motion on justice, reconstruction and rights in Syria (21/3046) and a Left motion, introduced among others by Özdemir, against cooperation with Islamist actors, for more humanitarian aid and for recognition of democratic self-administration (21/3304). Both were referred to committee, the Left text with the Foreign Affairs Committee in the lead. Özdemir said Druze, Alawites, Yazidis and Christians were still being killed and women and girls abducted. She described that as the practice of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham government under al-Sharaa, said a Bundestag research-service opinion had confirmed its involvement, and accused the federal government of ignoring the finding while withholding recognition from the self-administration in north-eastern Syria, which she said had fought the Islamic State. She asked for decentralization and protection of ethnic and religious groups rather than a new authoritarian centre. Thomas Rachel (CDU/CSU) said the new authorities were right to seek the trust of religious communities, but that killings in March on the coast and in July in Suwayda, mostly of Alawites and Druze, had involved security forces and that Damascus had failed to protect minorities. Berlin, he said, had demanded investigations and treated minority protection as a condition of stability and of any prospect of return. Stephan Mayer called Assad's fall welcome and Syria's direction slowly better, but not yet peaceful or stable; Germany should accompany that chance, he argued, and he rejected Özdemir's description of government conduct as scandalous.

Public standing

Media profile

Hamburg outlets described Özdemir’s profile in the Hamburg Parliament mainly through local interviews for Die Linke. On 6 March 2025, when she left the Bürgerschaft for the Bundestag, Norddeutscher Rundfunk wrote that the new parliament was losing “ein bekanntes Gesicht,” and that evening’s Hamburg Journal carried the report. On 13 August 2024 she gave the NDR summer interview on NDR 90,3 and Hamburg Journal, rejecting a new Olympic bid and saying, “Ich habe richtig Lust auf den Wahlkampf.”

Die Welt attached a sharper label. A 6 March 2025 article by Jana Werner ran under the headline “Hamburgs beliebteste Oppositionspolitikerin wechselt in den Bundestag” and called her “Hamburgs laut Umfragen beliebteste Oppositionspolitikerin.” It added that polls regularly ranked her the city’s third most popular politician, behind First Mayor Peter Tschentscher of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and Second Mayor Katharina Fegebank of Alliance 90/The Greens, and that after taking the faction chair in 2015 she became “das Gesicht ihrer Partei in Hamburg” and the “Galionsfigur” of the Hamburg Left. NDR’s February 2025 HamburgTrend, conducted by Infratest dimap, used a narrower line: she “führt die Liste der Oppositionspolitikerinnen und -politiker an.”

In a 7 March 2021 Welt am Sonntag interview she explained staying in Hamburg rather than seeking a Bundestag list place and, asked about a later move to Berlin, said: “Aber ich bin eben auch erst 32 Jahre alt. Berlin hat noch Zeit.” The article quoted then party chair Katja Kipping: “Du hast es in jungen Jahren geschafft, in Hamburg eine der beliebtesten Politikerinnen zu sein.” On 18 February 2025 the Hamburger Abendblatt featured her on Lars Haider’s podcast “Entscheider treffen Haider,” titling the episode with her line “Arme Leute sind unsichtbar” and her description of Die Linke as the city’s “soziales Gewissen.”

Residence and offices

The Bundestag biography states that she is married and has one child. She remained based in western Hamburg and commutes. NDR reported that she would not move her family to Berlin and would stay in the Osdorfer Born, the prefabricated high-rise estate in Osdorf and Lurup where she grew up. Welt quoted the same choice—“Ich werde nicht nach Berlin ziehen, sondern pendeln und die sitzungsfreien Tage in Hamburg nutzen”—and wrote that she still lived with her family at the Born.

A 21 June 2023 Hamburger Morgenpost profile, “Ich liebe meinen Brennpunkt,” recorded a temporary stay in nearby Iserbrook while she looked for a flat back at the Born, and a new office on Luruper Hauptstraße so she could speak with residents rather than about them. Her Bundestag office is listed at Platz der Republik 1, 11011 Berlin. The biography also lists constituency offices at Luruper Hauptstraße 149, 22547 Hamburg, and Burchardstraße 21, 20095 Hamburg.