Clara Bünger

Clara Bünger (born 4 July 1986 in Oldenburg) is a German lawyer and a politician of Die Linke who has sat in the Bundestag since 5 January 2022. She grew up in Freiberg, Saxony, took the Abitur there in 2005, and studied law at Leipzig University from 2005 to 2012. The Bundestag lists her as a fully qualified lawyer (Volljuristin). A legal clerkship in Berlin from 2013 to 2015 took her through the Federal Foreign Office, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, and an international law firm in Singapore, and ended with the second state examination.

In 2012 she worked in a Tel Aviv law firm on Holocaust compensation and ghetto pensions. In 2016 she volunteered on the Greek island of Chios giving legal advice to refugees, and that year co-founded Equal Rights Beyond Borders, whose board she still sits on. The organisation, formed in response to the March 2016 EU–Turkey statement, opened its first office on Chios in 2017 and later worked from Berlin, Athens, Chios and Kos. From 2018 until she entered parliament she was a research assistant to the Left deputy Gökay Akbulut. The Bundestag biography, which rests on members' own statements, also records membership of the trade union ver.di, football with Türkiyemspor Berlin, and one child; she is unmarried.

She took the Saxony state-list seat on 5 January 2022 after Katja Kipping left the Bundestag, having herself been the party's candidate in Erzgebirgskreis I. In the 20th legislative period she was a full member, and the Left's coordinator, of the Legal Affairs Committee and a deputy member of the Committee on the Interior. When the Left's parliamentary group was dissolved she sat without a group from 6 December 2023 and, from 2 February 2024, in the Left's Gruppe. A news-agency tally, drawing on Bundestag figures reported by Der Tagesspiegel, ranked her fifth in the chamber for plenary speeches that term, with 89. At the 2025 election she stood in Dresden II – Bautzen II, where Die Linke received 31,961 first votes (16.4 percent) and 31,001 second votes (15.9 percent); the direct seat went to the AfD's Matthias Rentzsch. She returned through the Saxony list.

In the 21st Bundestag she is a full member and the Left's Obfrau on the Interior Committee, which constituted itself on 21 May 2025 with four Left members, and she also sits on the Wahlausschuss and the body under Article 13(6) of the Basic Law. She is a deputy member of the committees on legal affairs and consumer protection and on digital policy and state modernisation, deputy chair of the parliamentary groups for West Africa and Eastern Africa, and a deputy member of the delegation to the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly. On 24 June 2025 the Left group elected her a deputy chair, with 81.3 percent of the vote, to lead its working group on law, democracy and anti-fascism; Heidi Reichinnek and Sören Pellmann became the group's co-chairs.

On 6 November 2025 a secret ballot for the Parliamentary Control Committee, which oversees the intelligence services, gave her 271 votes, 45 short of a majority, against 285 noes and 20 abstentions, so the Left again had no seat; Pellmann accused the CDU/CSU of equating his party with the AfD. On 27 November 2025, in the interior-ministry budget debate, she called it "the politics of the banality of evil" that people sent back to Afghanistan might be killed by the Taliban. Bundestag president Julia Klöckner reprimanded the wording as an equation with the setting in which Hannah Arendt had used the phrase at the Eichmann trial.

Early life and education

Upbringing in Freiberg

Clara Bünger was born on 4 July 1986 in Oldenburg, Lower Saxony, and grew up in Freiberg, Saxony. She has written that her family moved there shortly after her birth and that she grew up in a political milieu. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament notes is drawn from members' own information, records that she took the Abitur in Freiberg in 2005. For the Bundestag election that September, the federal returning officer listed her as Clara-Anne Bünger, a school student born in 1986 in Oldenburg and resident in Freiberg, in thirteenth place on the Saxony state list of Die Linkspartei.PDS. She has said that she joined the Saxon Party of Democratic Socialism that year, at 19.

In a November 2007 interview for the campaign Mut gegen rechte Gewalt, she described the youth initiative "buntes leben", formed in autumn 2003 around the alternative local paper FreibAerger, as a reply to growing activity in the district by the National Democratic Party of Germany, its youth wing, duelling student corporations and Kameradschaften. About 30 people aged 16 to 28, she said, organized vigils and a spring festival of more than 200 people against former NPD chairman Günter Deckert, who had bought a village inn in Gränitz in July 2001; publicity, she said, led the Freiberg district office to stop the project for a time under building law before Deckert won in court. In 2024 she told taz that the vigils were meant to prevent the inn becoming a Nazi meeting place, and that the group also handed out leaflets, supported refugees who had been attacked and pensioners facing eviction. She said the PDS was the only party that stood with them on the ground. The 2007 interview reported project funding of €5,000 from the European Union in 2004, €1,000 from the Amadeu Antonio Foundation in 2005 and €5,000 from Saxony's Weltoffenes Sachsen programme in 2006, and a nomination for the 2007 Saxon democracy prize.

In that interview she said the initiative had established that a former SS man, sentenced in Italy to life imprisonment, was living undisturbed in a Freiberg nursing home, and that it collected signatures demanding a German trial of those convicted over the Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre. Local press and Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk then took up the case; she said the Stuttgart prosecution was still investigating without a result. She described a jaw injury in an attack by right-wing youths, which she said happened because she was eating a döner with a friend—an explanation she attributed to a witness from that circle in a later court hearing—and said that the same evening neo-Nazis beat a friend at Freiberg's Tivoli hall. In 2024 she said right-wing youths had printed her face on flyers and had broken her jaw in an attack. Neues Deutschland, profiling her 2021 candidacy, reported that she had been beaten by right-wing extremists for the work, had opposed a Nazi training centre in a neighbouring village and had traced a convicted Nazi war criminal to a local retirement home. She and the initiative have also said that, in an under-18 vote in Freiberg around the 2005 federal election, the NPD finished ahead of the larger parties.

Legal studies and clerkship

After the Abitur she studied law at Leipzig University. The Bundestag biography dates the course from 2005 to 2012. A 2021 candidate sheet from Die Linke in Saxony calls her a scholarship holder of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation during those studies. In 2012, the biography and that sheet state, she worked in a law firm in Tel Aviv on compensation claims by survivors of the Holocaust and on ghetto pensions.

From 2013 to 2015 she completed the Rechtsreferendariat, the practical training that follows university legal study, in Berlin. The stations she reports were the Federal Foreign Office, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights and an international law firm in Singapore; the firm is not named. The biography says the clerkship ended with the second state examination, and the Bundestag lists her profession as Volljuristin, a fully qualified lawyer. The same paragraph also places a second state examination directly after the Leipzig studies, before the clerkship of 2013–2015.

Legal work and refugee advocacy

The biography published by the German Bundestag, which the parliament states is based on members' own information, records that in 2012 Bünger worked in a law firm in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Holocaust compensation and ghetto pensions. The same text dates her refugee-law work from 2016.

Volunteer legal aid on Chios

In spring 2016 Bünger was one of four organisers, with Robert Nestler, Vinzent Vogt and Catharina Ziebritzki, of a project then called Refugee Law Clinics abroad. Legal Tribune Online reported in April 2017 that the group had learned of conditions on Chios through the volunteer network Chios Eastern Shore Response Team, and that the first volunteers went to the island between May and July 2016. Vogt said they chose Chios because fewer legally focused organisations were working there than on Lesbos. A biographical note in a 2024 taz interview, placed after the Israel work, describes her as coordinator of legal advice for Refugee Law Clinics Deutschland on Chios.

The Vial reception centre on Chios, where asylum seekers were held in 2017.

The volunteers were working after the European Union–Turkey statement of 20 March 2016. As Legal Tribune Online summarised it, people who reached the eastern Aegean islands irregularly after that date were to be returned to Turkey, while EU states undertook to admit a Syrian refugee from Turkey for each person returned. National authorities ran procedures in EU "hotspots" with support from Frontex, Europol and the European Asylum Support Office. The magazine described overcrowded camps and slow, disordered processing. After a Frontex interview on the route, Eurodac registration and an identity screening, people waited for an admissibility interview. The organisers said that interview, meant to apply Greek law, was often conducted by the support office alone, although it had only an assisting role, and that applicants were often not told of a right to an interpreter or to check the record. Volunteers explained the procedure, prepared people to say why Turkey was not a safe third country in their case, mentioned family reunification and referred refused applicants to Greek lawyers.

The article said the pilot would end on 8 May 2017, when Bünger, a fully qualified lawyer, was to spend six months on Chios as resident coordinator, training later volunteers and keeping local contacts. Her Bundestag biography states that she gave legal advice to refugees on the island as a volunteer in 2016 and worked there again in 2017 for the association she describes as having co-founded in 2016.

Equal Rights Beyond Borders

The association was entered at the Amtsgericht Charlottenburg in Berlin on 13 February 2017 as refugee law clinics abroad e.V. (VR 35583 B). A register event of 4 December 2018 records the name Equal Rights Beyond Borders e.V. North Data, using register data, still lists the earlier name and gives the address as Gerichtstraße 23, Berlin. A 2019 study by Refugee Law Clinics Deutschland e.V. listed "Refugee law clinics abroad e.V. (neuer Name: Equal Rights Beyond Borders)" among German clinic projects and pointed to its Chios work beside a Berlin clinic project on Samos.

The current Bundestag biography calls Bünger a 2016 co-founder and board member, and members' disclosures still list her as a board member of the Berlin association. The association says its first office opened on Chios in May 2017, because legal aid there was particularly scarce, with later offices in Athens (2018), Berlin (2019) and Kos (2021). It describes a German registered association and a separate Greek non-profit company, says Dublin family reunification became a focus in 2017, and says that from 2018 it also challenged unlawful detention and filed complaints with the European Court of Human Rights.

German administrative courts were by then ordering family transfers from Greece. On 8 May 2018 the Administrative Court in Freiburg granted interim relief to a Syrian minor in Germany and required the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees to tell the Greek authorities that her parents and two siblings should be moved at once. The office had accepted Greece's request in July 2017, but the transfer due by 5 January 2018 under the Dublin Regulation had not happened. On the applicant's undisputed account, monthly transfers had been capped at about 70 people although Germany had agreed nearly 5,000 by September 2017. The court held that the regulation's family-unity rules also protected the relatives. The press notice does not identify counsel.

Camp conditions on Chios later reached the Strasbourg court for stays after 2017. In A.R. and Others v. Greece (18 April 2024) the Court held that the living conditions of a 79-year-old man with diabetes and a chronic heart condition at the Vial centre, from 21 October 2019 to 21 December 2020, violated Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It found the same violation for applicants on Kos and Samos, and a violation of Article 5 § 2 because a woman detained on Kos had not been told, in a language she understood, why she was detained. In M.A. and Others v. Greece (3 October 2024) it found a further Article 3 violation for a Syrian man with chronic hepatitis B who spent nine months in a tent at Vial while the centre was about 400 to 500 percent over capacity.

Parliamentary staff work

From 2018 to 2022 Bünger was a scientific staff member (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) in the Bundestag office of Gökay Akbulut of Die Linke. The current biography gives those years; the disclosure for the 20th legislative period listed the pre-parliamentary post as scientific assistant to Akbulut in Berlin.

The biography archived for that term, and the Left group's Bundestag profile, also record an engagement with the Seebrücke initiative, in both cases as part of her own biographical text. The current Bundestag biography no longer includes that line.

Elections and entry into the Bundestag

2021 candidacy and succession

A taz profile published on 23 August 2024 states that Bünger joined the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) in Saxony in 2005, when she was 19. She later stood for Die Linke. At the election to the Bundestag on 26 September 2021 she was that party's direct candidate in Wahlkreis 164, Erzgebirgskreis I, and held fifth place on its Saxon state list. Neues Deutschland, reporting the list ballot that April, wrote that the first four places went to people already sitting in the Bundestag and that Bünger, then a 34-year-old lawyer, was placed fifth, the highest-ranked newcomer on the list.

In the constituency, 76.7 percent of 210,941 eligible voters cast ballots. The Federal Returning Officer recorded 12,787 first votes for Die Linke, 8.0 percent and 7.2 percentage points below the party's 2017 share, and 12,078 second votes, 7.6 percent and 6.5 points lower than in 2017. Abgeordnetenwatch attributes those 12,787 first votes to Bünger as personal votes. The constituency seat went to the candidate of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), with 50,571 first votes (31.7 percent). The candidate of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was second, with 40,550 (25.4 percent).

Die Linke finished below five percent nationally. In the comparison table issued with the 2025 final result, the Federal Returning Officer credits the party with 4.9 percent of the 2021 second vote and 39 seats, three of them constituency seats. The law applied to that election still let a party under the five-percent threshold take part in the allocation if its candidates had finished first in at least three constituencies. Fifth place on the Saxon list did not yield Bünger a seat in the initial distribution. Katja Kipping renounced her membership of the 20th Bundestag with effect from the end of 3 January 2022. The Bundestag's archived biography states that Bünger acquired membership on 5 January 2022 for the departed Kipping.

2025 Bundestag election

Die Linke in Saxony drew up its state list on 11 January 2025 at a party congress in Dresden, for the German federal election held on 23 February 2025. About 150 delegates placed Sören Pellmann first, with 92 percent. Caren Lay then defeated Bünger for second place, 50.7 percent to 49.3 percent, and on the next ballot Bünger took third place with 89.9 percent. The Returning Officer's alphabetical list of those elected records Clara Anne Bünger for Die Linke as "Land Sachsen (Platz 3)", with Wahlkreis 159 entered beside her name.

The election was the first to the Bundestag under the Federal Elections Act as amended on 8 June 2023. Second votes fix each party's share of a house set at 630 seats — the same final-result notice gives 735 as the 2021 figure — and a candidate who leads the first vote in a constituency receives a seat only if the party's second votes in that Land cover it (Zweitstimmendeckung). Seats left after that coverage are filled in the order of the closed state list. A party under 5 percent of the national second vote is left out of the allocation unless, under the transitional rule set by the Federal Constitutional Court on 30 July 2024, its candidates placed first in at least three constituencies. Die Linke did not need that exception: it received 8.8 percent of the national second vote, against 4.9 percent in the 2021 column of the final result, and 64 seats, six of them constituency seats.

In Saxony the party polled 326,830 first votes (12.8 percent, up 1.3 points) and 290,462 second votes (11.3 percent, up 2.0 points). In Wahlkreis 159, Dresden II – Bautzen II, a different seat from the Erzgebirge constituency she had contested in 2021, Die Linke received 31,961 first votes (16.4 percent, up 4.6 points) and 31,001 second votes (15.9 percent, up 4.7 points). Matthias Rentzsch of the AfD won the constituency with 58,238 first votes (29.9 percent). Lars Rohwer of the CDU was second with 47,107 (24.2 percent).

Among those the Returning Officer recorded as elected in Saxony, Pellmann took Leipzig II (Wahlkreis 152) with 36.8 percent of the first vote. The Die Linke names returned from the state list were Lay on list place 2, Bünger on place 3 and Zada Salihović on place 4. Bünger's membership of the 21st Bundestag was therefore a list seat, not the direct mandate in Wahlkreis 159.

Parliamentary roles

Twentieth legislative period

Clara Bünger acquired a seat in the Bundestag on 5 January 2022, succeeding Katja Kipping of Die Linke. The mandate came through the state list of Saxony; she had also been the constituency candidate in Wahlkreis 164, Erzgebirgskreis I.

The archived biography for the 20th legislative period (2021–2025) records her as a full member and Obfrau of the Committee on Legal Affairs (Rechtsausschuss) and as a deputy member of the Committee on the Interior and Homeland. Each parliamentary group names one Obmann or Obfrau per committee: that member is the group's main contact with its leadership, helps set its line in committee, and takes part in settling the agenda and planning the deliberations.

On 8 July 2022 the first committee of inquiry of the term was constituted to examine the German withdrawal from Afghanistan between February 2020 and September 2021. Die Linke named Ali Al-Dailami as its full member and Bünger as deputy; the notice did not designate her Obfrau, and the archived list of her Bundestag offices does not record a post on the inquiry.

From 6 December 2023 she sat without a parliamentary group, after the Die Linke Fraktion dissolved. The group, previously 38 members, had fallen below the minimum of 37 — five per cent of the 736-seat Bundestag — and its former members became non-attached. On 2 February 2024 the Bundestag recognised 28 of them as the Gruppe Die Linke, and separately a group for the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, with the votes of the SPD, Alliance 90/The Greens and the Free Democratic Party against the CDU/CSU and the Alternative for Germany. The archived biography records Bünger as a member of the Gruppe Die Linke from that date.

Disclosures for the term, published under the members' rules of conduct, list from February 2022 a deputy seat on the board of trustees of Stiftung Forum Recht in Karlsruhe, a board seat at Equal Rights Beyond Borders e.V. in Berlin, and from March 2023 unpaid membership of the advisory board of Humanity in Action e.V. They also record that the Robert Bosch Stiftung met travel costs of 14,538.06 euros in 2024; published figures are gross amounts, not taxable income.

Twenty-first legislative period and group leadership

For the 21st legislative period the federal returning officer lists Clara Anne Bünger as elected for Die Linke in third place on the Saxony list, having also stood in Wahlkreis 159, Dresden II – Bautzen II. The current biography lists her as a full member and Obfrau of the Interior Committee (Innenausschuss) and as a full member of the Wahlausschuss and of the body under Article 13(6) of the Basic Law.

The Wahlausschuss has twelve members, elected at the start of each term in proportion to group strength, and proposes the judges of the Federal Constitutional Court whom the Bundestag elects. Half the judges of each senate are chosen by the Bundestag and half by the Bundesrat; election in the Bundestag requires a two-thirds majority. The Article 13(6) body has nine members. Article 13 protects the home but allows, in defined cases, technical surveillance of conversations inside a dwelling; the government reports annually on that use, and the body oversees it on the basis of the report.

She is also a deputy member of the committees on digital affairs and state modernisation and on legal affairs and consumer protection, a deputy member of the Joint Committee (Gemeinsamer Ausschuss), a deputy member of the delegation to the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, and a deputy chair of the parliamentary groups for West Africa and Eastern Africa.

On 21 May 2025 the Interior Committee constituted itself under vice president Andrea Lindholz (CDU/CSU). Of its 42 full members, the CDU/CSU has 14, the AfD ten, the SPD eight, Alliance 90/The Greens six and Die Linke four: Bünger, Katrin Fey, Ferat Koçak and Jan Köstering. The AfD nominee for chair, Jochen Haug, received 12 votes in favour, 29 against and one abstention; the AfD, which held the right to propose the chair, did not call a second round, and Thomas Silberhorn (CDU/CSU), the longest-serving member, chaired provisionally.

On 24 June 2025 the Die Linke Fraktion elected Heidi Reichinnek chair with 94.8 per cent and Sören Pellmann with 72.4 per cent. Its deputy chairs are the heads of its working groups and its spokesperson on women's policy. Bünger was elected, with 81.3 per cent, for the working group Recht, Demokratie und Antifaschismus (law, democracy and anti-fascism). The current disclosure repeats the Forum Recht, Equal Rights Beyond Borders and Humanity in Action entries and adds, from 7 April 2026, the advisory board of Medien in Bewegung e.V. in Berlin.

Asylum, migration and border policy

The Common European Asylum System

The European Union finished its Pact on Migration and Asylum when the European Parliament approved ten acts on 10 April 2024 and the Council adopted them on 14 May 2024, with application from 12 June 2026. The Council's account includes border screening, a border procedure for some applicants, revised responsibility rules and a solidarity mechanism.

Germany brought two transposition bills to the Bundestag. At first reading on 9 October 2025, Clara Bünger, for Die Linke, said the reform meant accelerated border procedures, "often under de facto conditions of detention, with restricted legal protection and hardly any access to legal advice," for people who had "done nothing except file an asylum application." She called the planned centres for people registered in another member state "nothing other than a new system of closed camps." Interior minister Alexander Dobrindt (CDU/CSU) called the pact the basis of a "migration turn" balancing "humanity, solidarity and order": procedures at the external border, an end to secondary migration, and solidarity with border states. The centres, he said, would allow travel onward to the responsible state but not free movement in Germany, and he sought scope for "return hubs" nearer countries of origin. Natalie Pawlik (SPD) said the centres should be optional for the Länder and that some rules would reach "the limit" of the Basic Law and the Geneva Refugee Convention. Irene Mihalic (Alliance 90/The Greens) called the plans a "frontal attack"; Bernd Baumann (Alternative for Germany) called the reform ineffective.

On 27 February 2026 Bünger said the bills would bring "more chaos, suffering and lawlessness" and leave "hardly anything" of the asylum guarantee. The previous coalition of SPD, Greens and the Free Democratic Party, she said, had helped build a "regime of closure" now applied "as restrictively as possible," while Berlin still did nothing about pushbacks, drownings or violence at the external borders, including by German officers at Frontex. She called such camps, of the kind she had worked in on Chios, the model, and the Mediterranean Sea the world's deadliest border; she also objected to detaining minors "for their welfare" and to listing Turkey as a safe country of origin. Dobrindt answered that the coalition was "sharpening and hardening" migration policy. Sebastian Fiedler (SPD) said children were not to be detained and that the clause only avoided separating an infant from a mother. The adaptation bill passed second reading with the coalition against Die Linke, the Greens and the AfD. The named final vote was 309 to 260, with two abstentions, on 571 votes cast; the companion register act passed a counted second reading by 296 to 212 and its third reading with the coalition against the other groups.

Deportation, Afghanistan and returns

On 18 January 2024 the Bundestag passed the Act to Improve Returns—longer departure custody, wider searches, and less advance notice of removals—with the SPD, the FDP and, with exceptions, the Greens in favour and the CDU/CSU and the AfD against. Bünger said the coalition had yielded to "pressure from the right" and would "make life hell" for people who had "only filed an asylum application." Dirk Wiese (SPD) called the longer custody "a hardness, but the right one."

On 18 July 2025 a flight left Leipzig for Afghanistan with 81 people, which her group called the second removal there since the Taliban takeover, using Qatar and what the Interior Ministry termed a strategic security partnership. Dobrindt described those aboard as "serious and most serious offenders," removed via "technical contacts" with Afghanistan. Her questions noted recent International Criminal Court warrants against two Taliban leaders and asked how many of the 81 came from psychiatric hospitals. After reports that at least three had come from Bavarian clinics, some not fully criminally responsible, she said the government was staging toughness "at the expense of severely mentally ill people" sent "into the arms of a terror regime."

In the interior-budget debate of 27 November 2025 she criticised the closure of admission programmes even for Afghans who already held a promise of entry. She said court orders to admit people were being ignored, put at about 2,000 the number still in Pakistan, and said they were offered money to return to Taliban rule rather than the charter flights she demanded; promises concerning Kenya, Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan were, she said, frozen. Alexander Throm (CDU/CSU) answered that voluntary programmes had to end because earlier entries had been too generous, that the Pakistan cases were being wound up as the law required, and that fewer than 10 per cent of those still there were former local staff, who would be admitted.

On 27 January 2025 taz reported a ministry answer to her questions on Tajikistan: at least four removed opposition figures had disappeared or received long sentences, and a query about Dilmurod Ergashev had gone unanswered. Bünger called that a shrug at serious misjudgements. Figures she obtained showed 17,651 deportations from January to September 2025, up from 14,706, chiefly to Turkey (1,614) and Georgia (1,379), including 3,095 children and adolescents; she said the authorities then "hardly know any taboos any more."

Rescue at sea and external borders

On 27 November 2023 Bünger and other Left members tabled a motion arguing that a draft change to section 96 of the Residence Act would make repeated humanitarian help, the pattern of sea rescue, punishable as smuggling, and asking for an exception modelled on the 2002 EU facilitation directive. The motion recorded a reply from the interior ministry, then under Nancy Faeser, that the duty to rescue excluded liability; Bünger still warned of Italian-style investigations. The returns act later included, the Bundestag reported, a clarification that rescuing shipwrecked people would remain lawful.

On 5 June 2025, after a Berlin administrative court ruling, she said Dobrindt had ordered asylum seekers turned back without examination of their claim, and that the court had found this very likely unlawful, including for want of a threat under Article 72 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. She spoke of 141 turnbacks and demanded that the order be withdrawn in favour of a Dublin procedure. Alexander Throm replied that Bulgaria was taking back only about ten people a week and that, with Dublin dysfunctional, Germany could not forgo the returns on which the Schengen Area had rested. Bünger said the judgment required a Dublin procedure and that the new pact kept the first-entry rule.

Interior affairs, oversight and civil liberties

The Committee on Internal Affairs

The Bundestag's Committee on Internal Affairs constituted itself on 21 May 2025 under Vice President Andrea Lindholz (CDU/CSU). Of its 42 full members, the CDU/CSU holds 14, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) ten, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) eight, Alliance 90/The Greens six, and Die Linke four: Clara Bünger, Katrin Fey, Ferat Koçak and Jan Köstering. The AfD, which had the right to nominate the chair, proposed Jochen Haug. A secret ballot gave him 12 votes in favour, 29 against and one abstention, and the group declined for the time being to call a second round. Thomas Silberhorn (CDU/CSU), the longest-serving member, took the chair provisionally. The Bundestag's account of the 6 November 2025 sittings described Bünger as her group's Obfrau, its spokesperson, on the committee.

Intelligence oversight votes

A seat on the Parliamentary Control Committee (Parlamentarisches Kontrollgremium, PKGr) requires an absolute majority of 316 votes. The committee oversees the Federal Intelligence Service, the Military Counterintelligence Service and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The government must brief it, and it may inspect files, question staff and enter service premises. Reduced from 13 members to nine, it filled only six seats on 26 June 2025. Left group chair Heidi Reichinnek received 260 votes, and AfD nominees Gerold Otten and Martin Hess 127 and 121; Konstantin von Notz of the Greens was the only opposition member elected. CSU state-group leader Alexander Hoffmann called Reichinnek's nomination a provocation unsuited to the body. SPD interior politician Lars Castellucci said there was no reason not to elect her, unlike the AfD candidates. Left co-chair Sören Pellmann called it a power game denying the democratic opposition a seat the Left had held through André Hahn.

On 9 October 2025 the Bundestag unanimously elected Bünger to a different nine-member body, under Article 13(6) of the Basic Law, which reviews the government's annual report on technical means of acoustic surveillance inside homes.

On 6 November 2025 a secret ballot on Bünger for the PKGr produced 271 votes in favour, 285 against and 20 abstentions, 45 short of a majority. Neither the Left nor the AfD was then represented. Pellmann accused the Union of equating the Left with the AfD. "The Left protects democracy, the AfD threatens it," he said, yet the Union was misusing the elections for a power game.

A further secret ballot on 7 May 2026 failed again. Of 598 votes cast, Bünger received 250 in favour, 305 against, 31 abstentions and 12 invalid ballots; Hess received 162 votes in favour and Otten 167. Three of nine seats stayed empty, with von Notz still the only opposition member. Reichinnek and Pellmann said the defeat prevented control and showed "absolute historical ignorance." AfD parliamentary director Bernd Baumann called excluding the largest opposition party unconstitutional. Marc Henrichmann, the committee's CDU chair, said mistrust of factions with close ties to despots and foreign powers precluded cooperation, and that the AfD in particular had never dispelled it. The domestic intelligence service classifies the AfD in part as right-wing extremist. The party sat on the committee from 2018 to 2021; Hahn once chaired it for the Left.

Policing and right-wing extremism

On 18 December 2025 the Bundestag gave a first reading to the government's bill to modernise the Federal Police Act (Drucksache 21/3051) and to a Left motion, tabled by Bünger and others, to narrow the force's powers (Drucksache 21/3306). Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) said the law dated largely from 1994, before cyberattacks and drones, and that some 55,000 officers deserved trust. He argued for station security zones, knife- and weapon-ban zones, suspicion-independent checks, high-resolution video and source telecommunications surveillance. SPD speaker Sonja Eichwede called the powers appropriate and legally secure, including against smuggling and trafficking.

Bünger called the bill "a step toward authoritarianism and a surveillance state." She said the Federal Police could decide almost at will whom to check, "without concrete suspicion, without objective criteria," and could itself open deportation-detention proceedings. The Left motion sought to delete suspicion-independent stops and searches, number-plate recognition and covert methods, and to require officer identification and body cameras when force is used. Green speaker Irene Mihalic said control receipts, meant in her view to guard against discrimination, had been struck from earlier drafts. CDU/CSU speaker Josef Oster answered that dropping a general identification duty and those receipts meant "We trust our police officers and we do not mistrust them."

On 16 November 2025 Der Spiegel, citing the RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland and an Interior Ministry answer to a Left question, reported 714 unexecuted arrest warrants against 535 right-wing extremists, 115 of them thought to be abroad. Bünger told the RND papers that the number had for years been worryingly high and that the authorities had to give the problem priority rather than look on. After the arrest of former BND president August Hanning on suspicion of espionage, she said on 6 October 2026 that the services were themselves a security risk, "not only since the entanglements of the Verfassungsschutz in the murder series of the right-wing terrorist National Socialist Underground," and that giving them still more powers was "fatal."

Other political positions

Housing and social policy

Elected to the Bundestag on the Saxony list, and a candidate in Dresden II – Bautzen II, Bünger told TAG24 in April 2026 that she had always rented and that housing was "the social question of our time." She said about 82 percent of people in Dresden rented, many spending nearly half their income on rent, and called large landlords a "Mietmafia," naming Vonovia — about 43,000 local flats, roughly 15 percent of the stock, she said — and Berlinhaus. Bills for services not provided, such as snow clearance without snow, were at least tolerated by those firms, unlike charges from small landlords. The rent brake was not enough, she argued: she wanted a rent freeze, repayment of overcharged rent, and more social and publicly owned homes. TAG24 reported 844 cases against Vonovia then pending at the Dresden district court.

On 8 September 2022, eight days after the 9-Euro-Ticket ended, she said fares of €49 or €69 would again shut millions out of mobility. Citing Deutsche Bahn figures, she said the number of people found without a ticket had almost halved during the cheap pass, from more than 214,000 to about 120,000. Unpaid penalty fares, she said, led to fines and imprisonment in default of payment, which could cost a home or a job. Die Linke wanted fare evasion decriminalised, that sentence abolished, and local public transport made free.

On 22 September 2026 she wrote on Abgeordnetenwatch that tying the pension age to life expectancy would cut pensions, because poorer people die sooner, and that she wanted a minimum pension with wider contributions, including from civil servants and politicians. The same day she opposed cuts to outpatient psychotherapy fees as likely to lengthen waits and push patients into self-paid care.

Defence and foreign affairs

In a ZDF heute-show item that Welt reported on 20 October 2025, Fabian Köster asked members, Bünger among them, how to make the Bundeswehr ready to defend the country. She said pushing young people "into a compulsory service" was "the wrong answer." Asked repeatedly for the right one, she refused to send young people to the border under compulsion, said the path was "in any case no compulsory service," and added that investing in peace "as much as in other things" would already help. Köster said he had not understood.

Welt called this a failure to answer. Bünger wrote that the item was "a funny edit" and pointed to party chair Jan van Aken, who rejected all conscription and called a service lottery "practically Russian roulette." Konstantin von Notz (Alliance 90/The Greens) wrote that credible answers to Russian attacks were decisive for Die Linke's democratic standing. On 5 December 2025 she voted No on the Military Service Modernisation Act, which passed 323 to 272 with one abstention.

On 23 June 2026 she told Abgeordnetenwatch that a state must be able to defend itself, but that "defence capability" was covering rearmament, including Chancellor Friedrich Merz's aim of Europe's strongest army. Conscription in a real war, she wrote, would send people to the front by force, hitting first those who could not refuse. She defined the term as social justice, education, civilian infrastructure and diplomacy, "not getting as many people as possible into uniform."

The Bundestag lists her as deputy chair of its West Africa and Eastern Africa parliamentary groups and as a deputy member of the German delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. It announced that from 25 October to 1 November 2026 an Eastern Africa delegation led by Ulle Schauws, including Bünger, would visit Tanzania and Rwanda, meet parliamentarians, officials and civil society, and lay a wreath at the Kigali Genocide Memorial.

Public profile and controversies

Speaking record and media presence

In the 20th Bundestag, a count reported by the Tagesspiegel and distributed by dts credited Clara Bünger of Die Linke with 89 plenary speeches, fifth of 733 members. Ralph Lenkert, also of Die Linke, was first with 120. Next were Robert Farle (118), Helge Lindh of the Social Democratic Party and Volker Ullrich of the CDU/CSU (107 each), and Nina Scheer (SPD, 91). Scheer’s total means the list does not make Bünger the woman who spoke most often.

On 17 November 2025 rbb Inforadio carried her criticism of money offered to several hundred Afghans in Pakistan in exchange for giving up an admission promise; she called that an attempt to buy the government out of the promise and said courts had already required many of the promises to be kept. On 28 January 2026 the Frankfurter Rundschau published her rejection of Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt’s plan, after an attack on Berlin’s power supply, to expand digital surveillance powers against left-wing extremism. She said police and prosecutors already dealt with crimes.

In October 2025 the ZDF satire heute-show had Fabian Köster ask members how Germany could become ready to defend itself. Bünger said compulsory service for young people was the wrong answer. Pressed for the right one, she said: “Da sagen wir einfach ‚nein‘. Mit dieser Antwort müssen Sie leben,” and insisted she had answered. Asked again, she said investing as much in peace as in other things would already help, then left for the plenary. Köster ended: “Ich habe es leider nicht verstanden.”

The banality-of-evil reprimand

On 27 November 2025, during the 44th sitting of the 21st Bundestag, Bünger spoke on the interior budget. She accused Dobrindt of ending admission for people from Afghanistan who already had protection promises, of ignoring court rulings, and of offering money to return to what she called the “Taliban terror regime.” Of people who might refuse the money, be sent to Afghanistan and be killed, she said: “Diese Gefahr droht. Und Sie sind dann verantwortlich, wenn diese Menschen von den Taliban getötet werden. Das ist für mich die Politik der Banalität des Bösen.” The record notes applause from Die Linke and an Alternative for Germany interjection from Götz Frömming that she was on thin ice.

President Julia Klöckner replied that Bünger had accused a parliamentary group of the “banality of evil.” She said Hannah Arendt had coined the term with the Eichmann trial in view, that Bünger knew the context, and reprimanded “eine solche Gleichsetzung.” Applause is recorded from the CDU/CSU, the AfD and the SPD, and from some members of Alliance 90/The Greens. Bünger is not recorded as answering. n-tv described the scene the same day as an uproar over a historically burdened phrase that set the interior minister and the president against her.

Reception

Die Welt treated the heute-show exchange as a failure to say how the Bundeswehr could be ready without conscription. Bünger called the clip a humorous edit and pointed to party chair Jan van Aken, who rejected compulsory service as a lottery like Russian roulette. Jacobin argued that accepting national defence made opposition to conscription hard to sustain. The Welt report also quoted Green member Konstantin von Notz, chair of the Parliamentary Oversight Panel, who called attacks on the satire nonsense and said Die Linke’s credibility required answers to Russian attacks on constitutional states.

On the evening of 25 July 2026 a vehicle was driven into a crowd at Berlin’s Christopher Street Day; tagesschau reported one woman killed and 29 people injured. Die Linke in Neukölln posted that anti-queer ideology from right-wing and conservative actors had prepared the ground, and did not mention Islamism. Bünger told the Münchner Merkur that a confirmed Islamist background had to be named, that extreme-right hostility to queer people was also real, and that not flying a rainbow flag on the Bundestag was a false signal, while direct blame for this attack could not yet be drawn. CDU member Christoph de Vries, quoted by the Merkur from comments to Bild, called the post a “dangerous alliance” of Islamists and the left.

On 6 November 2025 a secret ballot kept her off the Parliamentary Oversight Panel, with 271 votes in favour, 285 against and 20 abstentions, short of 316. Heidi Reichinnek had already failed in June, and group chair Sören Pellmann said the Union was equating Die Linke with the AfD.