Donata Vogtschmidt

Donata Vogtschmidt (born 24 February 1998 in Koblenz) is a German politician of Die Linke and a member of the Bundestag for Thuringia. The Bundestag lists her occupation as Staatswissenschaftlerin, a graduate in state sciences. She took her seat when the 21st Bundestag convened on 25 March 2025, after the federal election of 23 February 2025, having been returned on the Thuringian state list while standing in constituency 188, Eichsfeld – Nordhausen – Kyffhäuserkreis.

The Bundestag biography records a 2016 Abitur at the Elisabeth-Gymnasium and, from 2016 to 2022, a bachelor's and a master's degree in Staatswissenschaften at the University of Erfurt, the bachelor's with a social-science emphasis. In a March 2025 interview she said she had taken her Abitur in Eisenach, that the move of the state office of the National Democratic Party of Germany to the town and the uncovering of the National Socialist Underground had drawn her into activity against the far right while she was still at school, and that she became a school spokesperson at 16. Before parliament she worked, in 2018–19, as a teaching assistant at the Staatliche Ludwig-Bechstein-Schule in Arnstadt and, in 2020–21, as a student assistant at Die Thüringengestalter – Kommunalpolitisches Forum Thüringen.

In 2021, aged 23, she entered the Landtag of Thuringia as successor to Susanne Hennig-Wellsow and was its youngest member; she remained until 2024 as the Left group's spokesperson for disaster protection and the fire service. At the state election of 2024 she was Die Linke's direct candidate in constituency 10, Kyffhäuserkreis I. Turnout there was 70.3 percent; the Left received 2,279 constituency votes (11.3 percent), behind the Alternative for Germany on 36.6 percent, and Stefan Schard of the Christian Democratic Union won the seat with 42.0 percent.

In constituency 188 at the 2025 federal election, Christopher Drößler of the AfD won with 39.5 percent of the first votes (65,033). Vogtschmidt placed third with 11.9 percent (19,527 votes); Die Linke's second-vote share in the constituency was 13.3 percent (21,894), on a turnout of 80.3 percent. In the 21st Bundestag she is a full member, and the Left's Obfrau, of the Committee on Digital Affairs and State Modernization, a full member of the Defence Committee, and a deputy member of the Committee on Research, Technology, Space and Technology Assessment and of the enquiry commission on the COVID-19 pandemic. She is deputy chair of the German–Indian Parliamentary Group.

She is also the frontwoman of the Erfurt band Donata, which plays what regional coverage has called glitter punk-pop. During the 2024 state campaign the band released a cover of Trio's "Da Da Da" with then minister-president Bodo Ramelow; Der Spiegel described the video as an eighties pastiche used as campaign material. In the Bundestag on 9 October 2025 she opposed European proposals to scan private messages, arguing that the federal government was moving toward digital mass surveillance and that child protection required staffing and money for youth services and digital education. The Bundestag biography, drawn from her own disclosure, states that she is unaffiliated with a religion, unmarried, and has one child.

Early life and education

Childhood and schooling

Donata Vogtschmidt was born on 24 February 1998 in Koblenz, Rhineland-Palatinate. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament notes rests on members' own information, records her as having no religious affiliation. In November 2021 the Thüringer Allgemeine described her as from Mihla, in the Wartburgkreis of Thuringia, and wrote that her political path began in Eisenach.

She completed the Abitur in 2016 at the Elisabeth-Gymnasium in Eisenach. In a March 2025 interview she called the uncovering of the National Socialist Underground in Eisenach a formative experience. On 4 November 2011, when she was 13, police neared a motorhome in a suburb of Eisenach in which they suspected two fugitive bank robbers; shots were heard, the vehicle burned, and the bodies of Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt were inside. The same day Beate Zschäpe set fire to the Zwickau flat where the three had lived underground. The Federal Agency for Civic Education states that the exposure made public racist murders from 2000 to 2007, bomb attacks and bank robberies that police and domestic intelligence had long not treated as far-right terrorism.

She has connected those school years with the state headquarters of the National Democratic Party of Germany. The party's Thuringian office opened in Eisenach on 6 September 2014; police reported a peaceful protest of about 120 people, called by a broad alliance against right-wing extremism, followed by a short vigil. Vogtschmidt later said that the headquarters was moved to Eisenach while she was at school, that she became active against the far right as a pupil, and that at 16 she became Schulsprecherin, the pupils' spokesperson. She said the office taught her not to fear hierarchies.

In a biographical questionnaire that MDR published with a broadcast on 27 October 2019, she added two school roles: press and public spokesperson on education policy for the Landesschülervertretung Thüringen, and Thuringian delegate to the Bundesschülerkonferenz. Those lines are her own summary, not a separate institutional record.

University of Erfurt

From 2016 to 2020 she studied Staatswissenschaften – Sozialwissenschaften (state and social sciences) at the University of Erfurt, graduating Bachelor of Arts, and from 2020 to 2022 she took a master's in Staatswissenschaften, graduating Master of Arts. The Bundestag lists her profession as Staatswissenschaftlerin. Its Staatswissenschaftliche Fakultät combines public and private law, social sciences (political science and sociology) and economics, and states that on opening in 2000 it was the first in the German-speaking world to rejoin those fields; it reports about 800 students on the Staatswissenschaften degrees and an English-language Master of Public Policy.

The same Bundestag biography lists two jobs in those years: pedagogical assistant at the state Ludwig Bechstein School in Arnstadt from 2018 to 2019, and student assistant at Die Thüringengestalter – Kommunalpolitisches Forum Thüringen e.V. from 2020 to 2021. In the October 2019 questionnaire she was 21, gave her occupation as student and her home as Arnstadt, and described herself as unmarried with one child.

Student representation

That questionnaire also listed higher-education policy work in the Studierendenrat (student council) of the University of Erfurt; the spokespersonship of the Konferenz Thüringer Studierendenschaften (KTS); and the chair of Erfurt's Kommunaler Hochschul- und Studierendenbeirat, the city's municipal board for higher education and students. In the 2025 interview she placed that university activity after the school spokesperson role.

Under section 82 of the Thuringian Higher Education Act, in force from 24 May 2018, the KTS, formed from the state's student bodies, represents students to the responsible ministry and may comment on rules that affect them; its tasks, makeup and external representation depend on rules needing a two-thirds majority of the student bodies' central organs.

Reporting from the degree years confirms the spokesperson role. On 18 April 2018 the Deutsche Presse-Agentur, in a text carried by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, quoted her as KTS spokesperson on the semester ticket for regional rail. The KTS said operators had offered rises students could not accept, in places above 73 percent, against a 9.4 percent increase the conference had proposed, and Vogtschmidt said the companies would lose about 4.5 million euros a year if the contracts ended. The Studierendenwerk, the KTS said, buys the tickets for roughly 50,000 students at the state's ten higher-education institutions, and students pay whether or not they use them.

By September 2021 a DGB-Jugend podcast introduced her as a former KTS spokesperson. Linked to the Landeswissenschaftskonferenz in Jena on 7 September 2021, on studying in the COVID-19 pandemic, the episode had her review three digital semesters in Thuringia and what she argued federal and state politics and the universities would have to do to avoid a fourth.

Local politics and party offices

Arnstadt and the Ilm district

At the Arnstadt city-council election on 26 May 2019, Vogtschmidt stood for Die Linke and received 512 votes, the fifth-highest total on that list. The list won four seats, taken by Mareike Graf, Thomas Schneider, Dr. Rita Bader and Gerhard Pein, and she was not elected. On 22 August 2019 the new council confirmed her, on the group's proposal, as a sachkundige Bürgerin for the committee for youth, sport and social affairs. Under the municipal code of Thuringia, a council may appoint other eligible residents to committees as sachkundige Bürger; they have an advisory role only, and are not members of the council.

She was chosen for a state constituency while still outside the party. On 17 June 2019 a meeting of Die Linke in the northern Ilm-Kreis nominated her as its direct candidate for constituency 23, Ilm-Kreis II, for the Landtag of Thuringia. Twenty-eight of 105 eligible voters were present. On the first ballot she received 15 votes, Nick Schramm eight and Oliver Bötefür five; she then won the runoff with 60.7 percent. The Thüringer Allgemeine described her then as a 21-year-old student of Staatswissenschaften in Erfurt who was not a member of Die Linke, although she did not rule out joining.

The official list of constituency candidates names her, with Arnstadt as her place of residence, as Die Linke's nominee in Ilm-Kreis II. At the election on 27 October 2019 that list's constituency vote was 6,796, or 22.7 percent of 29,940 valid votes, behind the Alternative for Germany on 8,873 (29.6 percent) and the Christian Democratic Union on 6,944 (23.2 percent). Olaf Kießling of the AfD won the seat. Turnout was 66.7 percent. On the party-list ballot in the same constituency Die Linke was ahead, with 9,004 votes (30.0 percent).

At the Ilm-Kreis council election on 26 May 2024 she was returned. Die Linke received 18,533 votes (11.5 percent) and five of 46 seats; her 3,822 votes were the second-highest on the list, after Eckard Bauerschmidt's 4,103. The district election committee's final result included her among the five candidates elected, a finding published whether or not a mandate was later accepted. Resolutions of the constitutive sitting on 19 June 2024 placed her, for Die Linke, on the council's election commission, as a deputy member of the Kreisausschuss and of the committee for schools, culture and sport, and as a full member of the committee for equality, social affairs and health. On 20 November 2024 the council altered those assignments: she left the equality committee, where Dr. Rita Bader succeeded her; she ceased to be deputy on the Kreisausschuss, where Heidrun Krebs took that place; and Jens Petermann was named to the election commission and as deputy on the schools committee in the posts tied to the June decisions that had included her.

Offices in Die Linke

At the state party congress in Erfurt on 23 and 24 September 2023, Vogtschmidt was elected to the Landesvorstand of Die Linke in Thuringia. Her Bundestag biography, which reproduces members' own statements, lists that seat on the state executive together with the co-chairmanship of Die Linke in the Kyffhäuserkreis and the spokesperson's role in the state working group Linkes Frauennetzwerk. In December 2024, reporting her selection as a Bundestag candidate, the Thüringer Allgemeine described her as part of the dual leadership of the Kyffhäuserkreis association.

Thuringian Landtag

Succession in 2021

Donata Vogtschmidt entered the Landtag of Thuringia in November 2021 by succession, not as a member chosen at the previous state election. On the Die Linke state list for the 2019 Landtag election she stood in 29th place, and the state returning officer's roll of members of that parliament lists her as the successor to Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, with Arnstadt as her place of residence. In 2019 she had also been the party's candidate in Ilm-Kreis II, where she took 22.7 percent of the constituency vote and did not win the seat.

Hennig-Wellsow, a Landtag member since 2004 and then federal chair of Die Linke, resigned the state mandate after moving to the Bundestag in the wake of the 2021 federal election. On Friday, 5 November 2021, Vogtschmidt, aged 23 and from Arnstadt, accepted the mandate in Erfurt, as did Thomas Gröger of the Alternative for Germany, who succeeded the AfD's Michael Kaufmann; a Landtag spokeswoman said the change would take effect the following day. Reports at the time of her later candidacies describe her as the youngest member of the chamber. She remained with the Left group until 2024.

Committees and disaster protection

The Bundestag biography, drawn from members' own statements, lists her as the Left group's spokesperson for disaster protection and the fire service. For the 2019–2024 Landtag she is recorded as a member of the Committee on Internal Affairs and Municipal Affairs (Innen- und Kommunalausschuss), its subcommittee on municipal financial equalisation, and the constitutional committee. Ahead of the 2024 election she counted, as work of the term, progress on the reform of emergency control centres (Leitstellenreform), an expansion of the state disaster-protection store, and more funding for fire services, and said crews had told her on visits that they were grateful for political support. The same profile reported that she kept an office in the pedestrian zone of Sondershausen, the Kyffhäuserkreis district town, with a staff member there when she was away, and that she treated doorstep conversations as part of the mandate.

The statute covering that brief was rewritten at the end of the term. On 6 June 2024, in the Landtag's 137th sitting, Vogtschmidt reported for the interior and municipal committee on the Thuringian Act on Fire Protection, General Assistance and Disaster Protection (Thüringer Brand- und Katastrophenschutzgesetz), Drucksache 7/9658, introduced by the Left, Social Democratic and Green groups, and then spoke for her own group. Her report described a revision of about two years. It noted that amendments from those three groups and from the Christian Democratic Union raised flat-rate support for fire-service youth organisations to 50 euros a member and extended the same rate to youth organisations in disaster protection; that a rule on traffic direction by fire services, removed in drafting, was put back; and that new cost rules for stretcher assistance to the ambulance service were given a transition running to 2026. The votes turned in part on a clause requiring members of voluntary fire services to uphold the free democratic basic order. The Free Democratic Party group had sought to take that requirement out of the operative text, and a CDU amendment changed the wording from "eintreten" (to stand up for) to "einstehen" (to answer for). In the debate Vogtschmidt pointed to the higher youth payment and to the inclusion of psychosocial emergency care, and said the hearing had brought the draft broad professional acceptance. On the second reading Die Linke, the Greens, the SPD and the CDU voted in favour, nobody voted against, and the FDP group and the AfD abstained. The final vote was carried by the same four groups, again with no votes against.

2024 state election

For the 2024 Landtag election Die Linke again nominated Vogtschmidt, this time in constituency 10, Kyffhäuserkreis I, and in 17th place on the state list.

Donata Vogtschmidt, photographed for a Thüringer Allgemeine profile on her 2024 Landtag candidacy in the Kyffhäuserkreis.

She did not win the constituency. Official figures for Kyffhäuserkreis I record 29,119 people eligible to vote, 20,470 ballots cast and turnout of 70.3 percent. Of the valid constituency votes, the CDU received 8,453 (42.0 percent), the AfD 7,364 (36.6 percent) and Die Linke 2,279 (11.3 percent); Stefan Schard of the CDU was elected. Abgeordnetenwatch assigns those 2,279 votes, 11.3 percent, to Vogtschmidt. On the state-list ballot in the same constituency Die Linke took 12.1 percent, behind the AfD on 35.7 percent, the CDU on 23.7 percent and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht on 17.3 percent.

Across Thuringia, Die Linke won 13.1 percent of list votes and 12 of 88 seats: four constituency seats and eight from the list. Seventeenth place was not enough for a seat. MDR reported that the Left group fell from 29 members to 12, and named Vogtschmidt among eleven incumbents who stood again and were not returned; another ten Left members had not stood. The Bundestag biography dates her Landtag membership to 2021–2024.

Election to the Bundestag

List placement and campaign

The election to the 21st Bundestag was held on 23 February 2025. In Thuringia, Die Linke placed Bodo Ramelow first on its state list and Donata Vogtschmidt second; the final results record her as elected from list place 2, with a simultaneous candidacy in constituency 188. In an interview published on 18 January 2025, Ramelow called that ordering a Doppelspitze: "an older, somewhat more experienced man and a young, very committed and very active woman." On 20 November 2024, after the collapse of the federal coalition and with an early election pending, Ramelow, Gregor Gysi and Dietmar Bartsch launched what they called "Mission Silberlocke," standing in Erfurt, Berlin-Treptow and Rostock. Three direct mandates would, under the Grundmandatsklausel, have carried the party into the Bundestag in proportion to its second votes even below five percent; Ramelow described the effort as a "Seniorenexpress." The clause was not needed: nationally Die Linke took 4,356,532 second votes, 8.8 percent, and 64 seats. The new Bundestag met on 25 March 2025, and the parliamentary biography records Vogtschmidt as a member elected via the Thuringian state list for the 21st electoral term.

Constituency 188

Constituency 188, Eichsfeld – Nordhausen – Kyffhäuserkreis, was Vogtschmidt's direct-mandate district in northern Thuringia. Of 206,544 eligible voters, 165,873 voted, a turnout of 80.3 percent, 6.3 points higher than in 2021.

Among 164,518 valid first votes, Christopher Drößler of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) won with 65,033 (39.5 percent). David Gregosz of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was second with 45,728 (27.8 percent), 19,305 votes and 11.7 points behind. Die Linke's first-vote total, cast for Vogtschmidt, was 19,527 (11.9 percent), ahead of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) on 14,361 (8.7 percent) and Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) on 12,712 (7.7 percent). The Free Democratic Party (FDP) received 3,815 first votes (2.3 percent) and Alliance 90/The Greens 3,000 (1.8 percent). Against 2021, the AfD's first-vote share in the constituency rose by 16.9 points and Die Linke's by 1.1, while the SPD's fell by 13.4.

Second votes in the constituency ranked the AfD first with 64,146 (38.9 percent), the CDU second with 38,445 (23.3 percent) and Die Linke third with 21,894 (13.3 percent), 3.5 points above the party's 2021 share. The SPD and the BSW were almost level, on 14,094 (8.6 percent) and 14,085 (8.6 percent). Die Linke's second-vote count exceeded its first-vote count by 2,367. Under section 1(3) of the Federal Elections Act, a first-vote plurality becomes a seat only when the party's second votes in the state cover it; the Returning Officer recorded Drößler's win as covered, and Gregosz entered from third place on the CDU state list rather than from the constituency.

Die Linke's Thuringian result

Across Thuringia, 1,333,474 of 1,652,462 eligible voters took part, a turnout of 80.7 percent. Of 1,324,160 valid second votes, the AfD received 510,527 (38.6 percent, up 14.6 points on 2021), the CDU 246,065 (18.6 percent, up 1.7), Die Linke 200,688 (15.2 percent, up 3.7), the BSW 124,760 (9.4 percent), the SPD 115,915 (8.8 percent, down 14.7), the Greens 56,097 (4.2 percent, down 2.3) and the FDP 37,292 (2.8 percent, down 6.2). First votes ran in the same order at the top: AfD 38.7 percent, CDU 20.6 percent, Die Linke 15.9 percent, SPD 10.0 percent and BSW 7.3 percent.

The Sainte-Laguë allocation gave Thuringia 18 of the Bundestag's 630 seats: eight to the AfD, four to the CDU, three to Die Linke, two to the SPD and one to the Greens. All eight constituencies were filled, seven by AfD candidates and one by Ramelow. In constituency 192, Erfurt – Weimar – Weimarer Land II, he won 64,390 first votes (36.8 percent), 17,778 votes and 10.2 points ahead of the AfD candidate, and that seat was covered by second votes. Because his direct seat counted against Die Linke's three state seats, the two list places that were actually used were Vogtschmidt's (place 2) and Mandy Eißing's (place 3); Eißing had stood in constituency 194. The CDU seats went to Christian Hirte, Diana Herbstreuth, David Gregosz and Michael Hose, all from the state list. The SPD seats went to Carsten Schneider and Elisabeth Kaiser, and the Green seat to Katrin Göring-Eckardt. Of the AfD's eight seats, seven were the covered direct mandates, including Drößler's in constituency 188, and the remaining list seat went to Torben Braga from list place 3. The BSW's 9.4 percent in Thuringia produced no seat. Nationally it received 2,472,947 second votes, 4.981 percent, and it does not appear in the Returning Officer's distribution of seats; a party under five percent enters only if it wins three constituencies.

Work in the Bundestag

Digital affairs and state modernization

In the 21st Bundestag, Donata Vogtschmidt of Die Linke, elected on the state list of Thuringia, is an ordinary member of the Committee on Digital Affairs and State Modernization. Constituted on 21 May 2025 with 30 ordinary members, it elected Hansjörg Durz (CDU/CSU) as chair. Its brief covers digital sovereignty, infrastructure, the digital economy and the digital state, including administrative digitalization, less bureaucracy and the regulated use of artificial intelligence. At that sitting she was named Obfrau for Die Linke—the faction's main contact, who shapes its line and the agenda—alongside the whips of the SPD, the AfD and Alliance 90/The Greens; the CDU/CSU named its whip later. The biography dated 27 October 2026 still lists her as ordinary member and Obfrau.

On 16 May 2025, in her first speech, on the government statement on digital affairs and state modernization, she welcomed the new minister, Karsten Wildberger, and said Die Linke would scrutinize his work. She criticized a market logic that, as she put it, left infrastructure profits with companies and losses with the state, and argued that artificial intelligence was being treated as a cure-all without regard to energy use, discrimination or transparency, including in military uses outside the EU regulation. On 10 July 2025, in the first reading of Einzelplan 24 for the digital ministry, she said civilian IT security would receive nothing from a special fund channelled through that ministry. On 7 May 2026, in a current-affairs hour on the ministry's first year, she said she still welcomed its existence but described the record as privatization and centralization.

Written questions have covered related ground. In the collection of 4 July 2025 she asked whether the Länder and associations would be heard on transposition of the EU NIS-2 cybersecurity directive alongside coordination among ministries, whether part of the Bundeswehr special fund would pay for wider IT security including in municipalities, and which contacts since the 2023 World Radiocommunication Conference had concerned the upper 6 GHz band. From 1 to 7 February 2026 she travelled with a delegation of the committee, led by Durz, to Singapore and India, on administrative digitalization, AI strategy and quantum computing in Singapore and on AI, start-ups, rural digitalization and IndiaStack in Bengaluru.

On 25 June 2026 she spoke in the first reading of the government bill on strengthening cybersecurity (Drucksache 21/6585) and moved, with other members of Die Linke, "Gegen die Einführung von Hackbacks und offensiver Cyberabwehr" (Drucksache 21/6653). Addressing Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt, she said "active cyber defence" relabelled hackbacks and that preparing them would mean probing foreign systems on suspicion.

Defence committee

Vogtschmidt is an ordinary member of the Defence Committee. The 38-member body was constituted on 21 May 2025 under Thomas Röwekamp (CDU/CSU); Die Linke's ordinary members were Desiree Becker, Zada Salihovic, Ulrich Thoden and Vogtschmidt. It usually meets in closed session, and its central task is control of the defence ministry and its subordinate area, including the defence budget and procurement for the Bundeswehr.

On 4 December 2025 she spoke at the second and third reading of the bill on strengthening military security in the Bundeswehr, reported by the committee (Drucksachen 21/1846, 21/2580 and 21/3073). She said drone overflights, cyberattacks and disinformation were a real threat, but argued that the bill would turn the Military Counterintelligence Service into an operational authority able to search homes, read IT systems and use virtual agents, partly without judicial control or with review by one local court, and that operations abroad outside military premises would duplicate the Federal Intelligence Service. A written question answered on 22 June 2026 asked whether the ministry was responsible for destroying hostile IT infrastructure abroad and how the Bundestag's consent requirement under the Parliamentary Participation Act would apply. The published reply said the government does not as a rule comment on hypothetical questions; a further part was classified for official use only.

Research committee and the Corona enquiry

She is a deputy member of the Committee on Research, Technology, Space and Technology Assessment. The 30-member committee elected Karl Lauterbach (SPD) as chair on 21 May 2025; Die Linke's ordinary members then were Anne-Mieke Bremer, Nicole Gohlke and Sonja Lemke. It advises on research funding and on subjects such as artificial intelligence, quantum technology and supercomputing, and oversees the Office of Technology Assessment at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. On 25 March 2026 she co-signed a minor interpellation on expanding dual-use research under the federal space-security strategy (Drucksache 21/4972), which noted that the government had presented the strategy on 19 November 2025, before a ministerial council of the European Space Agency in Bremen, and had briefed the research and defence committees on 14 January 2026.

She is also Die Linke's deputy on the study commission "Review of the coronavirus pandemic and lessons for future pandemic events". Study commissions, which the Bundestag must set up if a quarter of members demand one, combine members with outside experts and close with a report, usually containing legislative recommendations. This one rests on a CDU/CSU and SPD motion (Drucksache 21/562). It was constituted on 8 September 2025 under Bundestag President Julia Klöckner; Franziska Hoppermann (CDU) was elected chair. It has 14 members and 14 external experts. Die Linke's ordinary member and Obmann is Ates Gürpinar, with Vogtschmidt as substitute. Its task is an account of the COVID-19 pandemic, of state measures and of citizens' perspectives, and a final report by 30 June 2027.

Other parliamentary offices

The Bundestag lists Vogtschmidt as a deputy chair of the German–Indian Parliamentary Group. Such groups are reconstituted each term by the Presidium; the Council of Elders sets their number and structure, and they maintain conferences, trips and contacts with foreign legislators. In June 2025 it provided for 47 groups covering 180 countries, with factions that do not hold a chair each entitled to one deputy. Markus Frohnmaier (AfD) is chair of the German–Indian group. Its published board also includes Henri Schmidt (CDU/CSU), Thorsten Rudolph (SPD), Anja Reinalter (Alliance 90/The Greens) and Vogtschmidt. Her Berlin office is at Platz der Republik 1; constituency offices are listed in Sondershausen, Heilbad Heiligenstadt, Jena and Eisenach.

Political positions

Digital policy and cybersecurity

In the Bundestag on 9 October 2025, in a debate the Alternative for Germany had requested on refusing the European Union plan known as chat control, Vogtschmidt accused the government of quietly installing EU-wide digital mass surveillance. She said it was unclear what would be scanned, and that faulty artificial intelligence could turn private photos and messages into suspected offences. Exempting security agencies and the military, she argued, showed the measure was not about children, and only a two-digit number of staff at the Federal Criminal Police Office worked on such imagery. Die Linke wanted the scanning stopped and the money spent on youth services and digital education. CDU speaker Konrad Körner called the overlap with the AfD a political horseshoe and said the government had never meant to approve suspicionless scanning. SPD speaker Johannes Schätzl said the interior and justice ministries had rejected the Danish draft, while Green MP Jeanne Dillschneider likened mass scanning to authoritarian practice and warned of false alarms.

On 11 September 2025, at the first reading of the bill transposing the EU NIS-2 directive, she said the state was stepping back from its own protection: binding rules would cover only the Chancellery and ministries, Länder and municipalities were left out, and the staffing estimate had been halved. She called this “digital gambling” and criticised the Federal Office for Information Security for helping police and intelligence services keep vulnerabilities secret. She cited nearly 1,000 reported cyberattacks a day and €180 billion in damage in 2024. Green MP Konstantin von Notz also called the draft gutted; CDU speaker Marc Henrichmann said the coalition was delivering after years of delay and put 2024 damage at €266 billion. On Deutschlandfunk on 12 August 2025 she called German authorities digitally backward and dependent on the United States, because citizens’ data sat on US servers.

On 25 June 2026 she opposed plans she said Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt was renaming “active cyber defence.” A hackback, she argued, means entering an attacker’s systems to disable them, which would require infiltrating foreign systems on suspicion. She put the cost at about €60 million a year, with about 5 percent for ordinary IT security at the BSI, and said cybersecurity was possible only with other states. CDU speaker Christina Stumpp called the powers protection, not retaliation, and cited about €200 billion in cyber damage for 2025. Green MP Marcel Emmerich also called them legally unsettled if the wrong system were hit.

Security, defence and foreign affairs

On 4 December 2025, on a law strengthening military security in the Bundeswehr, Vogtschmidt said that, apart from the AfD, nobody denied threats from drones, cyberattacks and disinformation, but that the bill was not legally precise or under parliamentary control. She accused the government of letting the Military Counterintelligence Service search homes, read IT systems and use virtual agents, partly without a judge, while ignoring what she called structural right-wing extremism. Die Linke and the AfD voted no; the CDU and the CSU, with the SPD, passed the bill; the Greens abstained. CDU speaker Thomas Erndl said the law would protect the forces and speed vetting for a rise toward 260,000 soldiers. Green speakers wanted a stronger service but cited constitutional doubts.

She co-sponsored Die Linke’s motion of 4 September 2025 for a bill deleting the conscription clause, Article 12a of the Basic Law, and for more money for voluntary services. It called conscription coercion and, citing SIPRI and NATO, said NATO states made about 55 percent of world military spending in 2024 and fielded more than three million troops, so reactivation was unnecessary. On the war in Ukraine she told watson in March 2025 that help should be humanitarian and diplomatic first, not German rearmament, while noting that about 80 percent of Left voters wanted stronger support and that Ukraine said it needed weapons. She said the party had no single peace line, and that some in Germany were chiefly pleased by arms firms’ order books.

Social policy, gender equality and rural Thuringia

In that interview she said she was still belittled as a young woman, citing the remark that she had “more piercings than years on the job,” and that she would be glad to convince one person that age and appearance do not decide who may do politics. Where arguments for the AfD turned on migrants sitting in the marketplace instead of working, she answered that people who had fled war were not the problem, and that waiting months in reception for a German course, while wanting to work, was a bureaucratic one.

On 26 March 2026, at the first reading of a Green bill on image-based sexual violence, she said 99 percent of people shown in deepfake pornography are women and that “the problem is not the internet — the problem is men.” She welcomed the draft but said the Digital Services Act meets deepfakes and doxing only poorly, while debate had shifted to data retention. CDU speakers called the Green text imprecise and said storing IP addresses is needed to find offenders; SPD speaker Hakan Demir said men had to take women’s side.

Campaigning in 2024 in the western Kyffhäuserkreis in Thuringia, she told the Thüringer Allgemeine that the district was not left behind and still had potential in family life, housing, the economy and culture, while young people often lacked prospects. She argued for on-demand buses as well as fixed routes, cited the youth club in Ebeleben, and asked for cooperation across parties rather than what she called “exclusionitis.” The paper also listed fairer pensions and wages among her aims.

Music

The band Donata

Donata Vogtschmidt is the frontwoman and namesake of Donata, an Erfurt group in Thuringia that political reporting has called a Glitzerpunkpop band and that Der Spiegel described in August 2024 as still largely unknown. The Thüringer Allgemeine, profiling her candidacy for the Landtag of Thuringia in the Kyffhäuserkreis, wrote that she was trying to keep time for the band alongside the mandate and life as a young mother. Bodo Ramelow later told taz that he had met her a few years earlier at a Christopher Street Day event in Altenburg, where attacks from the right, including death threats, had left little to laugh about; what stayed with him, he said, was the cheerfulness her music gave off "against all resistance." Asked by watson in March 2025 why a politician would also front a band, she said one ought to know how loudly an opinion can be put into a microphone, and that music was a form of speech which reached people emotionally. Spiegel quoted the slogan the band used of itself: "Antifaschismus ist Landarbeit."

Campaign recordings and later releases

Ahead of the Thuringian state election on 1 September 2024, the band and Ramelow put out a campaign video covering the 1982 Neue Deutsche Welle hit "Da Da Da" by Trio; the following January they performed the song together on stage in Erfurt.

Spiegel, on 10 August 2024, described the clip as VHS-textured 1980s kitsch. Ramelow, identified there as the 68-year-old guest singer, appears in sunglasses and sings "Was ist los mit dir mein Schatz? Aha." The magazine treated the video as campaigning rather than a joke: headlines were cut over the speech-song, including "Die Brandmauer ist eingestürzt," from the Thüringer Allgemeine, against "Geht es immer nur bergab?", and a remark by former minister-president Bernhard Vogel (CDU) that Ramelow was more dangerous than the AfD, against "Geht nur das, was du verstehst? Aha." The clip closes on "Du musst mich nicht lieben, Demokrat sein reicht." Spiegel left open whether the result was embarrassing or self-ironic, and noted that political pop songs in Germany had a mixed record.

Tagesspiegel reported the next day that the video was circulating on YouTube and Instagram as Die Linke tried to recover ground. A ZDF Politbarometer it cited then put the party at 15 percent in Thuringia, about half its 2019 share, with the AfD at 30 percent, the CDU at 21 percent and the BSW at 19 percent. Vogtschmidt told the Thüringer Allgemeine that people at her information stands liked Ramelow and that many hopes rested on him. watson later described the clip as having gone viral.

In a taz interview published on 18 January 2025, during the Bundestag campaign, Ramelow said a follow-up was being prepared and that he and the band would give their first concert in Erfurt on 22 January. Asked whether that collaboration explained why Vogtschmidt, the lead singer, stood at place two on the Thuringian Left list, he described the pairing as an older, more experienced man beside a young and very active woman. Photo agency Imago, in a caption carried by Alamy, recorded the night as a benefit concert at the Kalif Storch club, with Donata.Band and Ramelow performing "Da Da Da" and Vogtschmidt on stage.

Later recordings drew little of that press. The retailer Qobuz lists a single, "Nein heißt Nein," under the artist name Donata, dated 9 January 2026, issued by Artistfy Music, running 3 minutes 18 seconds and marked explicit. The credits name Vogtschmidt as lyricist and co-composer, Pierre Zissel and Max Gorny as producers and composers, and Christoph Ehrling as a further composer.

Public image

Media coverage

Regional and national coverage has framed Donata Vogtschmidt mainly through her age, her appearance and the overlap of parliamentary work with a band. When she entered the Landtag of Thuringia in 2021 at 23, succeeding Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, both Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk and the Thüringer Allgemeine later described her as the chamber's youngest member.

An August 2024 Thüringer Allgemeine profile, headlined as a "frontwoman in her job as well", presented the Arnstadt politician as a Kyffhäuserkreis direct candidate and paired her Landtag work on disaster protection and the fire service with a music video made with then minister-president Bodo Ramelow. In February 2025, during the Bundestag campaign, MDR reporter Grit Hasselmann followed the then 26-year-old Die Linke candidate at a market stand in Bad Frankenhausen. The piece treated her as a musician and a mother as well as a former Landtag member, and recorded her account of prejudice: visiting villages on fire-service business as a young Left politician who looked quite alternative, she said she had had to push through reservations, and that women speakers in parliaments and councils drew more side conversations. She told MDR that young women in politics needed a "thick skin", and that she would not duck the noise — "Augen zu und durch".

After the 2025 federal election, watson grouped her with other members under 30, noting that she had missed re-election to the Landtag in 2024, and illustrated the item with a concert photograph beside Ramelow rather than a formal portrait. In a 29 March 2025 interview she said she was "definitely" still belittled, "especially as a young woman", and quoted a remark she had been sent: "Mehr Piercings als Berufsjahre" ("more piercings than years on the job"). Asked about Annalena Baerbock's comment that being underestimated could sometimes be useful, Vogtschmidt said her age could break the ice precisely because people did not take her entirely seriously at first. She added that she would be content to convince even one person that young people belonged in politics regardless of age or looks. In February 2026 the Bundestag weekly Das Parlament published a profile whose title cast her as carrying the "pressure of the street" into parliament and as a performer of "Glitzerpunkpop".

Civil-society memberships

The posts that can be documented apart from her own publicity are narrower than the list on her Bundestag page. On 3 September 2022, at the 46th delegates' assembly of the Landesfrauenrat Thüringen in Weimar, she was elected deputy chair, with Julia Hohmann of the Paritätischer Wohlfahrtsverband becoming chair. The Bundestag's mandatory disclosure of outside posts, published with her biography, still lists an unpaid deputy chairmanship of Landesfrauenrat Thüringen e.V. in Erfurt, and no other association.

A separate biography on the same page, which the Bundestag says rests on the member's own information, also names membership of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, of Die Thüringengestalter – Kommunalpolitisches Forum Thüringen e.V., and of an entity written only as "GEWM". The foundation's Thuringian branch records a narrower, dated role: she was on its board after the 2019 members' assembly and left it, with Regine Ahlert, Stephanie Borck and Steffen Kachel, at the assembly of 29 November 2021 in Jena. "GEWM" is unexplained on the page, is not the usual abbreviation of the Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft, and is absent from the mandatory disclosures. The Thüringengestalter membership likewise appears only in that self-report, beside a note that she was a student assistant there in 2020–21.