Doris Achelwilm

Doris Achelwilm (born 30 November 1976 in Thuine, Lower Saxony) is a German politician of Die Linke and a member of the Bundestag for the state of Bremen. She sat in the 19th Bundestag from 2017 to 2021 and returned when the 21st Bundestag constituted itself on 25 March 2025. In the current term she is a full member and Obfrau of the Finance Committee and a deputy member of the Committee on Digital Affairs and State Modernisation, and the Left parliamentary group’s spokesperson on tax policy. She holds the seat through the Bremen state list and was the party’s candidate in constituency 54, Bremen I.

The Bundestag biography records that she passed the Abitur in 1996 and then studied German linguistics, history and politics at Leibniz University Hannover, moving into cultural journalism at the same time. A September 2017 profile in the Weser-Kurier said she had grown up on her parents’ farm in a village in the Osnabrück region and had worked, while a student, for the university’s equal-opportunities officer. The same profile reported that she wrote for Spex, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Jungle World, and that she interviewed musicians including Die Sterne, PJ Harvey and Die Goldenen Zitronen. On her own site she describes herself as a linguist with a magister degree and as a former culture and music journalist.

She came to party work in her early thirties, the Weser-Kurier wrote, after speaking on the use of music in science-fiction film at a congress in Bremen’s Kulturzentrum Paradox organised by a Left politician, then spending three months on campaign publicity and becoming press spokesperson of the new Die Linke group in the Bürgerschaft of Bremen. The Bundestag dates that press post from 2007 to 2017, her seat on the Radio Bremen broadcasting council from 2012 to 2020, and her time as state spokesperson of Die Linke in Bremen from 2013 to 2017. A Bremen party congress on 25 February 2017 elected her lead candidate for the Bundestag state list, by 49 votes to 33 against the sitting member Birgit Menz; Sebastian Rave and Nelson Janßen were nominated for the two constituencies. At the 2017 federal election Die Linke took 44,629 second votes in Bremen, 13.4 percent, and Achelwilm entered the 19th Bundestag on the state list, as a full member of the Committee on Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth and a deputy member of the Committee on Culture and Media.

She lost the mandate at the 2021 federal election. Die Linke’s second-vote share in Bremen fell to 7.7 percent (25,352 votes). From 2022 she worked for Bremen’s economic department, handling coordination for the Left as a coalition partner and serving as an adviser and stand-in at meetings, based at the state’s representation in Berlin; before she returned to parliament the department listed her as a personal adviser to the Senator for Economy, Ports and Transformation, with a right to return to that post. Her own account dates the employment from March 2022 to March 2025. In the 2025 federal election Die Linke won 14.8 percent of second votes in Bremen (51,461), and in constituency 54, where she was the candidate, the party’s first-vote share was 13.4 percent (25,810). The constituency seat stayed vacant for lack of second-vote coverage, and she took the party’s Bremen list seat.

Early life and education

Upbringing in the Emsland

Doris Achelwilm was born on 30 November 1976 in Thuine, a municipality of the Samtgemeinde Freren in the Emsland district of Lower Saxony. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament states is based on members’ own information, gives that birthplace and no further account of her childhood.

The fullest published description of where she grew up is a September 2017 portrait in the Weser-Kurier. The paper wrote that she came from Lower Saxony and had grown up in the countryside, in a village in the Osnabrücker Land, on her parents’ farm; it did not name the village. Official and party biographies name Thuine and her secondary school rather than a childhood address.

She gained the Allgemeine Hochschulreife, the Abitur, in 1996. In the note she publishes about herself, and in the text supplied to Abgeordnetenwatch, that examination is placed at the Gymnasium Leoninum in Handrup. The school describes itself as a state-recognized independent Catholic Gymnasium in the south-west of Lower Saxony, in the Emsland district, run by the Herz-Jesu-Priester (Priests of the Sacred Heart) and named Leoninum after the order’s founder, Johannes Leo Dehon. It presents a classical- and modern-language profile with a science stream, and states that just under 1,100 pupils in years 5 to 13 attend, within a network that includes both the Emsland and Osnabrück districts. Teaching began on 22 May 1923 as the Humanistische Studienanstalt of the Handrup mission house, with a boarding section. The state recognized it as a full Gymnasium in 1956; it took the name Gymnasium Leoninum at the start of the 1964/65 school year; and in 1971 girls were admitted for the first time, after which it ceased to be a boys’ school. Achelwilm’s Abitur therefore came more than two decades after that opening to girls.

Studies in Hanover

After leaving school she studied German linguistics (Deutsche Sprachwissenschaft), history and political science at the University of Hanover. On 1 July 2006 that university was renamed the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz University Hannover; her Bundestag biography and later profiles use the later name for the institution at which she studied. The parliamentary biography pairs the course with her entry into cultural journalism and does not give a year of graduation.

The qualification recorded alongside that course is what parliamentary profiles cite when they describe her as a linguist. Abgeordnetenwatch lists her berufliche Qualifikation as Sprachwissenschaftlerin (M.A.), distinct from the post she has actually held (Angestellte), and her self-description there calls the Hanover course a Magister programme in German linguistics, history and politics. A 2024 capture of the same profile gave the qualification in full as Sprachwissenschaftlerin (Magistra Artium). Die Linke’s 2017 Bremen candidate page used the same formula, “Sprachwissenschaftlerin M.A.” after a Magister course in those subjects, and the party’s Bundestag group profile during her first term listed her Beruf as Sprachwissenschaftlerin.

While a student in Hanover she took casual work, including a job with the university’s equal-opportunities officer (Gleichstellungsbeauftragte). She told the Weser-Kurier that going into politics as a profession had not been her plan: she had been politically active outside parties and trade unions and had seen herself instead as a cultural journalist, intending to write about music and pop culture.

Journalism

Cultural and music writing

The Bundestag biography, drawn from Achelwilm's own information, states that after the Abitur in 1996 she studied German linguistics, history and politics at Leibniz University Hannover and entered cultural journalism. She gives the degree as a Magistra Artium in linguistics and describes herself as a former culture and music journalist, naming Spex (Magazin für Popkultur) as an example. In a 2017 Weser-Kurier profile she said she had been politically active outside parties and trade unions and had seen herself as a culture journalist: she had wanted to write about music and pop culture, "and that is what I then did."

der Freitag, in a round table of 26 December 2018 as Spex ended in print after 38 years, identified her as an author there from 1999 for eight years, until in 2007 she became press spokesperson of the Die Linke group in the Bürgerschaft of Bremen. Coming from a farm in Lower Saxony, she said, she had met the magazine through friends who read it, and it had been "a window onto another world, musically, but also in terms of how one lived and of politics," a counter-design to the mainstream. She added that the crumbling of such central authorities had something good about it, but also less binding force around shared claims.

Scans of the 1999 issues, when the magazine was still made in Cologne, show the work at close range. The September issue named her, with Tom Holert, as moderator of a conversation with Justus Köhncke and Egoexpress. The October masthead listed her as editorial assistant; publishers named there included Diedrich Diederichsen. In that issue's literature section, "Der Teufel mit dem besseren Gespür für Peinlichkeiten" starts from being asked, at 22, about one's pop novel, and treats the genre as nearly purposeless biographical storytelling. In November she compiled news with Alex Bohn and Holert and, in a review, called Le Tigre's tone "unbeschwerte Zähigkeit" (unburdened tenacity). With Dietmar Dath and Holert she compiled "1990–1998: Ein Spex-Digest" for December.

Radio and other outlets

The Weser-Kurier profile names the outlets beyond Spex. It called the magazine one of the main German organs for pop and subculture, and reported that she also wrote for papers as different as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Jungle World, and interviewed musicians including Die Sterne, PJ Harvey and Die Goldenen Zitronen. The profile is the published source for those interviews and for work in the Frankfurter Allgemeine.

Jungle World still lists two 2004 pieces in its culture section dschungel. "Jung, ledig, schlaflos" (issue 33/2004) discusses Kathrin Röggla's wir schlafen nicht and Marlene Streeruwitz's Jessica, 30, both Fischer, 2004, as books about contemporary work that quote their figures instead of telling a conventional plot. "Auf der Suche nach …" (issue 50/2004) is about the Berlin band Dominique, around the artist and critic Dominic Eichler, and the records Speak to me (2002) and The same You.

Neither that profile nor the Bundestag self-report records a reporting or presenting job at Radio Bremen. The station enters the official biography later, as membership of its Rundfunkrat from 2012 to 2020. Introducing her in November 2013 as a new co-spokesperson of the Bremen Left, the tageszeitung still called her a culture journalist as well as press spokesperson of the Bürgerschaft group.

Party career in Bremen

Entry and press work

Achelwilm did not come up through the party's youth organization. In her early thirties she entered party politics through a science-fiction congress at the Bremen cultural centre Paradox, organized by a politician of Die Linke. Invited as a cultural journalist, she spoke on the use of music in science-fiction films and there met a party still new, formed in 2007 by the merger of the eastern Party of Democratic Socialism and the western Labour and Social Justice – The Electoral Alternative. She then spent three months as a temporary assistant on campaign publicity. The short engagement did not stay at producing leaflets: from 2007 to 2017 she was press spokesperson of the Die Linke group in the Bürgerschaft of Bremen, a caucus that at the outset still had to pull itself together.

At a party congress in May 2010 she stood for the extended federal executive and was not elected, together with the other Bremen candidates: deputy group chair Inga Nitz, who had sat on that executive since June 2007; the Bürgerschaft member Klaus-Rainer Rupp; and Christoph Spehr, then a state spokesperson and federal spokesperson of the inner-party current Emanzipatorische Linke (Emancipatory Left). taz wrote that Bremen, which it called the smallest state association, would no longer be represented there. The former Bremen resident Axel Troost, by then based in Saxony, also fell short, with 39.2 percent in a second ballot.

On her own account, alongside the press post, she was spokesperson of the district association Die Linke Bremen Mitte-Ost from 2009 to 2011 and has sat on the state executive since November 2011. The Bundestag biography, which rests on members' own information, adds that from the years as group press spokesperson she was active in working groups and other bodies of the Bremen party.

District and state leadership

Over the weekend before 18 November 2013 a state congress elected Achelwilm and Spehr as Landessprecher, the two co-equal spokespersons who lead the Bremen association. Spehr, a staff member of the Bürgerschaft group, was confirmed in office; Achelwilm, still the group's press spokesperson, succeeded Cornelia Barth, who was elected only to the extended executive. taz headed the note "The group takes over the party."

In an interview the next day she placed herself, with Spehr, in the Emanzipatorische Linke, calling it an integrative current whose point was to form a centre and to bring supposedly incompatible lines together. Internal-current politics, she said, was not then playing a large role. On the charge that two employees of the parliamentary group were now leading the state party, she described herself as an interface between group and membership, said the overlap was not only harmful, and denied having a line to push through under cover of the dual role. She ruled out standing at the next Bürgerschaft election. She argued that the state association had stabilized and that congresses ran in a more orderly way, but that the information gap between group staff and other members had to be narrowed if indifference was not to set in.

For the 2014 European election she argued for solidarity beyond the nation-state and against treating a fiscal-consolidation course as obligatory. In Bremen she opposed the debt brake as a policy that impoverished the state, said the Hartz IV laws still had to go, and called for a solidaristic, unconditional minimum income in their place. She welcomed signs that the Social Democratic Party of Germany was treating Die Linke as a possible partner, but said entering government was not the point of her project and that she was not ready for it while Bremen kept the debt brake. She named Mayor Jens Böhrnsen and Karoline Linnert as politicians who, unlike her party, were not opponents of that brake and who in her view cut too much. Allies outside parliament, she said, mattered more.

At the state congress of 14–15 November 2015, the morning after the attacks in Paris, she opened by saying the party was shocked at their cruelty. Delegates confirmed her as Landessprecherin with 89.5 percent and no opponent. Felix Pithan, a 29-year-old climate researcher, became the other co-spokesperson with 73.2 percent against Jan Restat. Spehr stood down, telling the congress that an office in Die Linke should not normally last longer than eight years and that he already had seven behind him; Birgit Menz was re-elected treasurer. Group chair Kristina Vogt demanded a state wealth tax, which she said was possible on the same analogy as a minimum wage. The lead motion Achelwilm defended for the state executive, adopted unanimously after debate, refused to call refugee arrivals a "refugee crisis" and described them instead as a crisis of capitalist relations; she again asked that a Bremen wealth tax be examined in law.

She remained co-spokesperson into 2017, by then with Pithan, while keeping the group press post. When the state party drew up its Bundestag list in February 2017, taz noted that the Bremen Left set store by separating party office from a parliamentary mandate, so a Bundestag seat could mean giving up the spokesperson post that autumn. After she took the seat, the congress reported on 18 November 2017 elected successors: Pithan, confirmed against Norbert Schepers, and Cornelia Barth, who had already been Landessprecherin from 2007 to 2013. Achelwilm told that congress that membership had grown markedly and urged a clear line against the Alternative for Germany and other right-wing currents; whether the party would seek a place in government after the 2019 Bürgerschaft election was not debated. A profile published just after the September 2017 federal election recalled doubts, from the time she was placed first on the list, about how someone tied to what taz called the intellectually quirky inner-party network of the emancipatory left would be received. Her website still lists the state-executive membership she dates from November 2011 and describes the post as deputy state spokesperson; the Bundestag biography likewise lists that membership.

Broadcasting council of Radio Bremen

Appointment and term

Doris Achelwilm was an ordinary member of the Rundfunkrat of Radio Bremen, the public-service broadcaster for the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, sent by Die Linke. The council constituted on 24 May 2012 listed her for a term to 23 May 2016. It had 25 ordinary members and deputies, each named for four years by a socially relevant organisation, with a twelve-year cap on any person; Eva-Maria Lemke-Schulte was re-elected chair. Radio Bremen described the council as representing the general public, supervising programming, advising the Intendant and the directorate, and electing both, and as meeting in public at least four times a year.

A March 2016 revision of the Radio-Bremen-Gesetz added sending bodies, including the Alevi community, the Bundesraat för Nedderdüütsch, the Lesbian and Gay Association, the Humanist Union and the Landesteilhabebeirat. The council constituted on 2 June 2016 again listed Achelwilm for Die Linke, and elected Klaus Sondergeld chair. In the statute in force from 6 April 2024, the Rundfunkrat is an organ of the station alongside the Verwaltungsrat, the Intendant and the directorate. Members serve honorarily and are not bound by instructions; they may not pre-clear individual offerings, and they watch that the station meets its legal remit. The council’s tasks include statutes, choosing and removing the Intendant and the directors, six Verwaltungsrat seats, the budget and the accounts, complaints about programmes already transmitted, and advice to the Intendant on programming. Parties and voter associations with group strength in the Bürgerschaft of Bremen each send one member, and no more than ten.

She was still a committee member in February 2020. That council’s last sitting was on 19 May 2020. On 4 June 2020 the new council’s minutes named Michael Horn, not Achelwilm, as Die Linke’s ordinary member for 2020–2024. A Bundestag biography compiled from her own information gives the same span, 2012 to 2020.

Future committee

The Zukunftsausschuss was created in 2008, when, after an amendment of the Radio Bremen law, the council adopted new rules of procedure and added a future committee beside its television, radio and finance committees. The tageszeitung reported it against still unsettled financing of the station inside the ARD.

On 10 August 2016 the committee constituted itself, chose Annette Düring, sent by the German Trade Union Confederation, as chair, and chose Achelwilm as deputy chair. The minutes describe the committee as a place to discuss station subjects in depth; on 26 October 2016, with Achelwilm present, it heard the editorial lead of the youth service Bremen NEXT. On 27 April 2017 she attended a joint sitting with the television and radio committees whose main subject was the ARD’s digital strategy. Plenary minutes of 7 December 2017 still call her deputy chair, when she pointed the council to the summary of the 25 October committee meeting, which she had missed.

On 25 June 2020, after her term, the new council widened the Zukunftsausschuss. The successor, the Ausschuss für Zukunftsfragen und Telemedien, follows technical, legal, financial and political media developments, monitors telemedia concepts, and considers whether a three-step test is required. Its sittings are not public.

First Bundestag term

2017 federal election

Achelwilm entered the Bundestag at the 2017 German federal election, held on 24 September 2017, as the only member returned for Die Linke from the state of Bremen. On 28 February 2017 a Bremen party meeting elected her lead candidate on the state list, by 49 votes to 33, ahead of the sitting member Birgit Menz; Menz was placed second and Kyra Behrje third. The official ballot printed that order, starting with Doris Achelwilm, Birgit Menz, Kyra Behrje, Mazlum Koc and Ramona Seeger. She did not stand in a constituency. Sebastian Rave became the candidate in constituency 54 (Bremen I) after a tie with Klaus-Rainer Rupp was broken by a coin toss under party rules, and Nelson Janßen won the nomination for constituency 55 (Bremen II–Bremerhaven).

She was then state spokesperson of the Bremen Left and press spokesperson of its group in the Bürgerschaft of Bremen. She said she would contest a widening gap between rich and poor, and argued that Bremen had been particularly affected by Agenda 2010, including low pay, Hartz IV and rising poverty rates. In the final count Die Linke took 44,629 second votes in Bremen, 13.4 percent, 3.3 percentage points more than in 2013; its first-vote share was 11.9 percent (39,405 votes). The SPD won both constituencies, Sarah Janina Ryglewski in Bremen I and Uwe Schmidt in Bremen II–Bremerhaven. The other seats from the state went by list to Elisabeth Motschmann (CDU), Kirsten Kappert-Gonther (Greens), Achelwilm and Frank Magnitz (AfD). The archived Bundestag biography records a state-list mandate and membership from 24 October 2017, when the 19th Bundestag met, until 26 October 2021.

Committees and faction roles

The archived biography for the 19th term lists her as a full member of the Committee on Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth and as a deputy member of the Committee on Culture and the Media. In late November 2017 the assignments were still open: she told the Weser-Kurier that she had applied for the family committee and also for labour and social affairs and for culture and the media, and that she expected to become the group's spokesperson on equality and queer policy. By December 2018 the taz identified her as the Left Bundestag group's spokesperson for equality, queer and media policy, and a February 2019 Weser-Kurier note described her as its media and equality spokesperson. During the mandate she also remained on the Radio Bremen broadcasting council; the Bundestag's register of members' outside functions records that office as ending on 31 May 2020.

Parliamentary work

Much of her plenary work took the form of Left motions on which she was the first named signatory, on family and social policy, pay and representation, trans and intersex law, and media. An early written question, answered on 22 November 2017 and printed in paper 19/120, asked what share of German arms-export licences to Saudi Arabia had gone to Bremen applicants: for January to September 2017 the Economics Ministry reported four of 92 licences, 159,107,462 euro of 246,992,556 euro, or 64.4 percent.

With Cornelia Möhring, Petra Sitte and the Left group she tabled, on 27 February 2018, a motion to raise the share of women in the Bundestag under the equality mandate of the Basic Law (printed paper 19/962), and the next day a motion on equal pay (19/1005). The equal-pay text put the gender pay gap in gross hourly earnings at 21 percent and called for stricter transparency, a collective right to sue, and changes to mini-jobs and spousal tax splitting. On 23 February 2021 a further motion in her name (19/26872) argued that the 30 percent supervisory-board quota of 2015 had had only a limited effect. In November 2017 she was among the sponsors, though not the first, of a Left bill to repeal section 219a of the Criminal Code, the ban on advertising abortion (printed paper 19/93).

A motion of 10 October 2018 (19/4828) asked parliament to guarantee self-determination, equal treatment and bodily integrity in matters of gender, citing the October 2017 ruling of the Federal Constitutional Court that a civil register limited to "male" and "female" was unconstitutional (1 BvR 2019/16). In a taz interview that December she said the Left supported a third positive gender entry, but that the government draft still depended on a medical attestation instead of a change by administrative act at the registry office. Further motions in her name called for an end to sex-assigning operations on children (19/9056, 4 April 2019), for an official apology and compensation for non-consensual operations (19/17791, 11 March 2020), and for removal of what the text called stigmatising exclusions of queer people from blood donation (19/30603, 10 June 2021). On 24 March 2021 she moved an amendment (19/27935) to the government bill on children with variants of sex development, so that parental consent would not cover operations intended only to align a child's body with an expected sex.

On 7 May 2020 she spoke for the Left on the government bill against so-called conversion treatments, calling a ban overdue but the age limit of 18 too low, and objecting that parents stayed outside the offence if they recommended or arranged such measures. The House rejected two Green amendments backed by the Left, then passed the bill with the CDU/CSU, SPD and FDP; the other groups abstained, except for one AfD vote against on the final division. The same agenda listed her as first named sponsor of Left motions for a family "rescue package" (19/18941), a corona parental benefit, and support for home care (19/18749).

In a February 2019 Weser-Kurier commentary she wrote that mergers were threatening press diversity, defended public broadcasting against campaigns to abolish the licence fee, and argued for a more social contribution. A motion in her name on 13 February 2019, on gender-equitable film funding (19/7706), cited a directors' association report that women directed 22 percent of cinema projects. On 3 November 2020 a further motion in her name (19/23937) asked the federal government to press the Länder to fund public broadcasters in line with Federal Constitutional Court rulings of 1992, 2007 and 2018, and to examine offsetting exemptions from the broadcasting contribution out of public funds.

Years outside parliament

2021 federal election

Achelwilm stood again for the Bundestag in 2021 for Die Linke in Bremen. The state party elected her to first place on its Land list with 89 percent of the votes and also nominated her for the direct mandate in constituency 55, Bremen II–Bremerhaven.

Die Linke received 25,352 second votes in Bremen, 7.7 percent, 5.7 percentage points below 2017. In constituency 55 its candidate—Achelwilm—polled 10,617 first votes (7.5 percent, down 4.0 points) and the party 9,613 second votes (6.7 percent). Nationally Die Linke fell to 4.9 percent of second votes but still won 39 seats: the basic-mandate clause gives a party that wins at least three constituencies seats in proportion to its second votes even below five percent, and the party entered as a full parliamentary group. The Bremen share yielded her no seat. As lead candidate on the state list, she left the Bundestag after one term.

She called the result very disappointing in the federation and in Bremen, and said the party's messages had not reached voters clearly enough. She told the Weser-Kurier it was a severe setback, that she had prepared no alternative, and that once Bremen stayed below eight percent she no longer expected a mandate.

Employment in the Bremen economic department

From 2022 she worked for Bremen's economics administration at the state's representation in Berlin. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament says rests on members' own information, describes her from 2022 as an employee of that department, responsible for coordination on behalf of the Left as coalition partner and as an advisor and session representative at the Landesvertretung. She dates the post, summarised on her website as coordination of Bundesrat business, from March 2022 to March 2025. The job disclosed for the period before her renewed membership is personal advisor to the Senator for Economy, Ports and Transformation, with a right of return and protection against dismissal.

The 2023 annual report of Bremen's Court of Audit does not name the employee, but it describes a matching appointment. In March 2022 the Senator for Economy, Labour and Europe filled, without public advertisement, a post limited until the end of 2023 for women's and youth affairs and for Bundesrat coordination, and seconded the person hired to the Berlin representation. The department said coalition talks had conceded the post because it was a "new" coalition partner, and that Berlin needed a trusted person to represent the senator beyond the department's own briefs. The term to December 2023 was meant to cover the May 2023 state election and the formation of a new Senate.

The court rejected that account. Political agreement and a coordination task did not turn an ordinary post into the narrow exception of a personal advisor. The person hired was seconded away from the senator's staff, under other superiors, and the contract ran past the June 2023 end of the legislative period, so the missing advertisement was objected to.

On 13 November 2025 CDU and FDP members of the Bürgerschaft of Bremen moved to inquire, among other things, into Achelwilm's unadvertised work in 2022–2023 at that department and the representation. The motion asked whether a coalition arrangement, possibly at odds with equal access to public office under Article 33(2) of the Basic Law, had treated a Berlin coordination post as due to Die Linke, and whether skipping an advertisement had been lawful. A notice of 27 August 2026 for that inquiry listed her—by then again a Bundestag member, and described as a former advisor to the Senator for Economy, Ports and Transformation—as a witness for 3 September 2026, alongside officials of the department, the audit office, and the office of Bremen's plenipotentiary to the Federation.

Return to the Bundestag

2025 federal election

On 16 November 2024, at the Helene Kaisen neighbourhood centre in Gröpelingen, Die Linke in Bremen and Bremerhaven drew up its lists for the Bundestag election. Radio Bremen reported that Doris Achelwilm was elected to first place on the state list with 97 percent of the vote, and that Dariush Hassanpour, a member of the Bürgerschaft of Bremen, was placed second. Quoted as the state lead candidate, she called for a counterweight to Friedrich Merz, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) chancellor candidate. The Federal Returning Officer records her as elected from Land Bremen, list position 1, and as also standing in constituency 054.

The snap election was held on Sunday, 23 February 2025, for a Bundestag of 630 seats. Nationally, Die Linke received 4,356,532 second votes (8.8 percent, up 3.9 percentage points) and 64 seats, 25 more than in 2021. In the state of Bremen, turnout was 77.8 percent of 450,564 eligible voters. Die Linke's 51,461 second votes were 14.8 percent, a gain of 7.0 points, behind the Social Democratic Party (SPD) on 23.1 percent, the CDU on 20.6 percent, Alliance 90/The Greens on 15.6 percent and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) on 15.1 percent.

Under the Sainte-Laguë method, those votes produced one of the party's 64 seats. Divided by the divisor 70,000, the unrounded quotient was 0.735 and rounded to one seat, assigned entirely as a list seat. Bremen was allocated five seats in all. The SPD's only seat was the covered constituency mandate in constituency 055, Bremen II – Bremerhaven, at a first-vote share of 30.3 percent. The CDU, the Greens, the AfD and Die Linke each received one list seat and no constituency seat. The five members are Uwe Schmidt (SPD, constituency 055), Thomas Röwekamp (CDU, list place 1), Dr Kirsten Kappert-Gonther (Greens, list place 1), Sergej Minich (AfD, list place 1) and Doris Maria Achelwilm (Die Linke, list place 1).

In constituency 054, Bremen I, where she was the Left candidate, the party took 25,810 first votes (13.4 percent, up 5.1 points) and 30,832 second votes (15.9 percent, up 7.4 points). Turnout was 81.2 percent of 239,863 eligible voters. The constituency stayed empty: the SPD led the first votes with 25.2 percent and the CDU was runner-up on 24.0 percent, but the returning officer recorded that the seat remained unfilled for insufficient second-vote coverage. From 2025 a party wins a constituency only with the most first votes and only if the seat is covered by that party's second-vote seats in the Land. Plurality winners are ranked by first-vote share, and the Land seats are assigned in that order. The SPD had two pluralities in Bremen and only one seat, so constituency 055 was covered and constituency 054 was not. The 21st Bundestag constituted itself on 25 March 2025. Achelwilm's mandate is the Bremen list seat; the biography also records the candidacy in Bremen I.

Finance Committee

She is a full member of the Finance Committee and Die Linke's Obfrau on it. In Bundestag usage an Obfrau or Obmann is a group's principal contact with its leadership inside a committee. Each group names one per committee. They take a decisive part in setting the group's line, agree agendas and plan the business, and report the detail of the committee's work back to the group. The Left group separately lists her as its tax-policy spokesperson in Arbeitskreis I.

The committee constituted itself on 21 May 2025 with 42 full members: 14 from the CDU/CSU, ten from the AfD, eight from the SPD, six from the Greens and four from Die Linke — Achelwilm, Uwe Foullong, Christian Görke and Isabelle Vandre. The AfD, which held the right to nominate the chair, proposed Kay Gottschalk, who was absent. In a secret ballot he received 11 yes votes and 31 no votes. No further round was requested, so the chair stayed vacant, and Olav Gutting (CDU/CSU), a Bundestag member since 2002 and the committee's longest-serving member, presided until a chair or deputy chair could be chosen. On 25 June 2025 Görke was elected deputy chair by 23 votes to 15, with two abstentions. Because the chair remained unfilled, he has led the committee since that sitting. Apart from the budget, the committee's field matches the Federal Ministry of Finance. It is ordinarily the lead committee for tax policy, financial-market regulation and customs, and it considers the bills, motions, government reports and European Union items referred to it.

Digital affairs and other posts

She is a deputy member of the Committee on Digital Affairs and State Modernisation. That committee constituted itself the same day, 21 May 2025, and elected Hansjörg Durz (CDU/CSU) chair by 23 yes votes and seven abstentions. It has 30 full members and 30 deputies. Its business is digital and network policy — digital sovereignty, infrastructure, the digital economy and the digital state — together with state modernisation. Die Linke's full members at that sitting were Anne-Mieke Bremer, Sonja Lemke and Donata Vogtschmidt, not Achelwilm.

The Bundestag biography lists no further offices. Her own website also describes her as parliamentary managing director with special tasks (Parlamentarische Geschäftsführerin mit besonderen Aufgaben) and as a member of the German-Korean parliamentary group. The group's published executive instead names Ina Latendorf of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern as parliamentary managing director. The newspaper nd reported that the 64-member group elected Latendorf to that post in June 2025, with 87.9 percent, in succession to Görke.

Political positions

Tax and fiscal policy

In the 21st Bundestag, Doris Achelwilm has argued for lower taxes on small and middle incomes and higher taxes on wealth, inheritances and capital income. A January 2026 motion of Die Linke that she co-sponsored asked the government to levy the wealth tax again. Collection had stopped in 1997 after the Federal Constitutional Court, on 22 June 1995 (2 BvL 37/91), held that taxing real property on outdated unit values more lightly than other assets breached the Basic Law, and required a new statute by 31 December 1996. The motion would tax personal net wealth above €1 million, with €5 million more free for business assets, from 1 percent to 5 percent at €50 million and 12 percent above €1 billion, and asked for study of an income-tax credit of the kind proposed by Gabriel Zucman. The text’s “conservative” yield was about €100 billion a year, almost all on the richest 2 percent.

The estimates come from a study the German Institute for Economic Research wrote for the Left’s Bundestag group, its state groups and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Stefan Bach, Florian Wichers and Tony Mudrack put the take, with no change in behaviour, at about €147 billion a year. With planning, lower investment and emigration, they thought it could fall by about a third, or by up to 80 percent once lost profit and income taxes were counted. They advised a gradual, preferably coordinated introduction, citing weak investment and doubts about taxing wealth rather than its return. Tagesschau reported the replies. Tobias Hentze of the employer-oriented German Economic Institute preferred taxes on income and capital gains, noting that about two thirds of the largest fortunes are business assets. The CDU/CSU rejected another burden on firms; Jens Spahn had called the wealth distribution “not in order” but looked to inheritance tax or social insurance. The Alternative for Germany wants the wealth tax abolished, while the Social Democratic Party of Germany and Alliance 90/The Greens have in principle favoured heavier taxes on large fortunes.

On 25 June 2026 she told the House that unlimited tax rises were the opposite of her party’s line: capital income, top salaries and million-euro incomes should pay more, and 95 percent of people should pay less, because large fortunes led “a highly privileged life of their own.” Her motion would raise the basic allowance to €16,800, set 53 percent from €85,000, 60 percent from €250,000 and 75 percent from €1 million, end the flat 25 percent tax on capital income, and replace spouse splitting — which the text says weakens the second earner’s pension, usually a woman’s — with a transferable allowance. CDU spokesman Fritz Güntzler replied that the top 1 percent already paid 25 percent of income tax and that pure redistribution was not a reform.

On 19 December 2025 she said the Boehringer and Schwarz families matched the poorer half of the population, that 75 percent of billionaires had inherited wealth taxed “far below” wages, and that of €300 to €400 billion transferred in 2024 only about €13 billion reached the Länder and municipalities. A family home was taxed, she said, while from 300 dwellings the business-asset needs test meant an heir “practically pays nothing.” The Bundestag rejected the Left motion to end those privileges, 507 votes to 47. CDU deputy Olav Gutting called the comparison with small estates “sheer populism” and said business property had to stay sheltered to protect jobs.

Social security and labour

She signed the November 2019 motion that called Hartz IV, in force since 2005, a labour-market and social-policy failure: benefits too low, pressure on wages, and no shield against poverty. It demanded a sanction-free minimum income, an end to sanctions under Book II of the Social Code, individual rather than household claims, a statutory minimum wage of €12 with no exceptions, and limits on mini-jobs and agency work. In February 2025 she wrote on Abgeordnetenwatch that people should live from their wage rather than top up benefits or hold several jobs. The statutory minimum, she said, still had to exceed €15 that year — her reading of the 2022 EU directive against in-work poverty — and then rise with inflation, including for young workers, alongside stronger collective agreements.

She has treated the overhaul of Bürgergeld as a diversion onto the poor. On 19 December 2025 she set planned savings of about €86 million against untaxed billionaire wealth and called them an “Ablenkungsmanöver.” On 5 March 2026 the CDU/CSU–SPD bill renaming the benefit and tightening the duties passed by 321 votes to 268, the opposition against, to take effect in stages from 1 July 2026. CDU general secretary Carsten Linnemann said a missed appointment or refusal of a job, even a worse-paid one, could end the payment. Left chair Sören Pellmann said sanctions brought fear, not stable work. The draft itself counted €86 million saved in 2026 and €69 million in 2027. Chancellor Friedrich Merz had said in December 2024 that standing Bürgergeld “back on its feet” would save double-digit billions. Spending in July to September 2026, the first quarter of the new rules, was reported near the year before.

Equality, gender and media

In the 19th Bundestag she was the Left group’s spokesperson for equality, queer politics and media policy. Her October 2018 motion would repeal the Transsexuals Act of 1980 and let anyone choose “female,” “male” or another term at the registry, without a medical report or a court, and more than once. It also sought a ban on deferrable gender-altering surgery on children who could not consent, and insurance cover for gender-affirming care, citing the Federal Constitutional Court’s ruling of 10 October 2017 (1 BvR 2019/16) that a male-or-female register was unconstitutional. In the taz in November 2020 she called that Act “geschlechtliche Bevormundung und Gängelung,” and the “divers” entry — limited to a proven physical “variant of sex development” — too narrow. Queer policy, she wrote, “takes nothing away from anyone”; the consistent opposition, including the AfD’s campaign against “Genderismus,” was on the right.

The Self-Determination Act passed on 12 April 2024, while she was out of parliament, by 374 votes to 251 with 11 abstentions. For trans, intersex and non-binary adults it replaced the two reports and the court order with a registry declaration after three months’ notice, with separate rules for minors, from 1 November 2024. Rules on medical treatment, and the house right of women’s shelters, were unchanged. CDU deputy Mareike Lotte Wulf said the duty to protect children was neglected and abuse was not met. The AfD called the law “ideological nonsense.” Sahra Wagenknecht said sex was being turned “from a biological fact into a question of state of mind.” For the governing parties, queer commissioner Sven Lehmann said sterilisation, forced divorce and psychiatric reports under the old Act had caused “a great deal of suffering.”

On 17 October 2019 she defended public broadcasting, citing an Infratest survey in which 83 percent of respondents called it indispensable. She criticised precarious contracts for regularly used freelancers and asked for regulation of large platforms rather than limits on broadcasters’ online text. On the licence fee she cited 3.5 million enforcement cases a year at the ARD ZDF Deutschlandradio Beitragsservice and proposed that the state refund exemptions for people on BAföG or unemployment benefit II.

Personal life and affiliations

Residence

Achelwilm states that she lives in Bremen-Walle. That page, which lists her Bundestag roles from 2025, does not mention a partner or an allotment. Abgeordnetenwatch records her place of residence as Bremen. Her Bundestag biography gives a constituency office at Doventorstraße 2, 28195 Bremen, and a parliamentary office at Platz der Republik 1 in Berlin, and no private address.

On 1 September 2017 the Weser-Kurier published a profile by Sara Sundermann, written while Achelwilm was the Bremen lead candidate of Die Linke. The caption says she liked to spend weekends growing tomatoes on her plot in Findorff, in western Bremen; that afternoon she was cutting lettuce there, a short distance from her flat in Walle. The paper reported that she held the allotment with her partner (Lebensgefährte) and grew vegetables there, including a surplus of zucchini she said had also supplied the Left office. She said she would not move to Berlin if elected. Pointing to the plot, she said, "Mein Freund und ich sind hier eng verwurzelt," and added that many members commute and keep a small second flat in the capital. The Bundestag biography and the Abgeordnetenwatch profile for the parliament elected in 2025 still give Bremen and do not repeat that account of a partner or a garden.

Civic and union memberships

Her website lists memberships, including supporting memberships (Fördermitgliedschaften), without saying which entries are which or naming an office: ver.di, the Rosa Luxemburg Initiative, the VVN-BdA (Landesvereinigung Bremen), Blaumeier e.V., the Bremer Erwerbslosenverband e.V. and Bremer Sport-Verein (BSV).

ver.di, the Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft, describes itself as a trade union of 1.8 million people in about 1,000 occupations. The Rosa-Luxemburg-Initiative calls itself the Bremen state foundation of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. In 1992 the Party of Democratic Socialism, now Die Linke, recognized that foundation, formed in Berlin in 1990, as its affiliated body for political education.

The VVN-BdA describes itself as a non-partisan association of Nazi persecutees, resistance fighters and antifascists, founded in 1947 as the Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes by survivors. The Bremen branch says the association has existed in the city since 1947, begun by survivors of Nazi prisons and camps and by people from the antifascist resistance; Achelwilm's listed tie is to that Landesvereinigung. The Blaumeier-Atelier, which she lists as Blaumeier e.V., says it has worked since 1986 as an open arts project in Bremen-Walle, in theatre, music and visual art, with rooms on Travemünder Straße. The Bremer Erwerbslosenverband e.V. states that since 2008 it has advised on rent, work and job-centre claims, that it is independent of the state and of companies and financed only by donations and fees, and that it is part of the Solidarische Zentrum Bremen. Bremer Sport-Verein 1906 e.V., abbreviated BSV by the club and in her list, was founded on 1 January 1906 and took the name Bremer Sport-Verein von 1906 on 31 July 1920. Its ground is the Stadion am Panzenberg in Bremen.