Gesine Lötzsch

Gesine Lötzsch was born on 7 August 1961 in Berlin-Kaulsdorf, then part of East Berlin. She is a politician of Die Linke who sat in the Bundestag for the Berlin-Lichtenberg constituency from October 2002 until the end of the 20th electoral term in March 2025. She won the district six times on the first vote, with shares recorded in the Bundestag biography as 39.6 percent in 2002, 42.9 percent in 2005, 47.4 percent in 2009, 40.3 percent in 2013, 34.8 percent in 2017 and 25.8 percent in 2021. In 2024 she announced that she would not stand in the February 2025 federal election.

After the Abitur in 1980 she studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin and qualified in 1985 as a teacher of German and English. A research degree at the same university included a semester in the Netherlands in 1987 and ended in 1988 with a doctorate on a Middle Dutch plenarium. She worked there as a research assistant and has been on leave since January 1991. She joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany in 1984 and, in 1990, its successor, the Party of Democratic Socialism. From 1991 to 2002 she was a member of the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin, chairing the PDS parliamentary group from 1991 to 1993 and the committee on European and federal affairs and media policy from 1996 to 2002.

On 15 May 2010 a federal party congress in Rostock elected her co-chair of Die Linke with Klaus Ernst, in succession to Oskar Lafontaine and Lothar Bisky; delegates gave her 92.8 percent of the vote. She resigned the chair on 10 April 2012, writing that her husband's illness no longer allowed her to be away from Berlin as often, and said she would concentrate on her Bundestag seat. In parliament she was the Left group's budget spokesperson from 2005, deputy group chair from September 2005 to April 2012 and again after the 2017 election, and chair of the Budget Committee from 15 January 2014. After the Die Linke Bundestag group was dissolved on 6 December 2023 she sat without a Fraktion until 2 February 2024, when she joined the smaller Die Linke Gruppe, and she held the Lichtenberg seat again in the partial rerun of the Berlin election on 11 February 2024.

Her decision to leave electoral politics was accompanied by a public criticism of the party executive. She argued that the poor 2024 European election result followed a strategy that reflected the party programme only in part, that the leadership had avoided talking about peace because the membership was divided on the question, and that the choice of Carola Rackete as a lead candidate had been a mistake. Der Spiegel noted that her direct mandate was one of three that let Die Linke enter the Bundestag in 2021 after the party missed the five-percent threshold, and that she had repeatedly been criticised over her dealings with former Stasi employees. The Bundestag biography, drawn from her own statements, records that she is widowed and has two children.

Early life and education

Childhood in Lichtenberg

Gesine Lötzsch was born on 7 August 1961 in Berlin-Lichtenberg. She has given that district as her birthplace; the biography she supplied to the Bundestag records the place simply as Berlin. Her birth name is recorded as Gesine Gorisch in the Landesarchiv Berlin's biographical handbook of Berlin parliamentarians. Lichtenberg was part of East Berlin, in the German Democratic Republic. Six days after her birth, on 13 August 1961, East German forces began closing the sector boundary that became the Berlin Wall.

Little else about her childhood has been published. She has written that before the Abitur she attended the Coppi-Schule, and the Bundestag biography, based on her own information, dates the Abitur to 1980. In the GDR that examination was the qualification for university. The ten-year Polytechnische Oberschule was the comprehensive school attended by virtually every pupil; only about a tenth of an age cohort was admitted to the Erweiterte Oberschule, where the Abitur followed the twelfth grade. Until 1984 pupils could transfer there after the eighth grade rather than after the tenth.

Studies at Humboldt University

From 1980 to 1985 she studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin, then in East Berlin, and qualified as a Diplom-Lehrerin, a certified secondary-school teacher, in German and English. The German National Library's authority record lists her occupations as politician, teacher and philologist, and records the degree Dr. phil. She remained at the university for a Forschungsstudium, a research course leading to a doctorate, from 1985 to 1988. In 1987, during that course, she spent a research semester in the Netherlands. Asked in 2010 on the platform Abgeordnetenwatch how a period of study in the West had been arranged and paid for, she replied that under cultural agreements between the GDR and other states such stays for students from East and West were organized and financed. The question had described the stay as lasting about a year; her answer did not specify the length or the host institution.

Doctorate and academic post

In 1988 she received the doctorate. The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek catalogues the dissertation as a typescript Dissertation A submitted that year at the Humboldt University, running to 151 leaves with diagrams and marked as not for exchange. The title is Computergestützte Studien zum mittelniederländischen Plenarium Ms. germ. 1612 (Computer-assisted studies of the Middle Dutch plenarium Ms. germ. 1612).

The table of contents shows a survey of Middle Dutch scholarship, including East Middle Dutch and the use of computers on historical texts; a description of the manuscript, its illumination and the Devotio Moderna; a method for computer-assisted transcription and grammatical analysis; and a linguistic description centred on the personal pronouns, set against Middle Dutch, Middle Low German and Middle High German paradigms. Closing sections place the manuscript linguistically and discuss the experience of computer-assisted work. Appendices include sample programs, citation lists, keyword-in-context concordances and the theses; the contents note that the program examples appeared only in the examiners' copies.

The manuscript she studied is Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Ms. germ. fol. 1612, acquired in 1967 by the then Deutsche Staatsbibliothek in East Berlin. It is a richly illuminated fifteenth-century sermon book, dated about 1430–1440, containing lessons on the Epistles and Gospels for the church year and known as the Nuttelijc Boec. Scholars have disagreed over whether its language is Middle Dutch or Middle Low German. In a 2018 study Cora Zwart reported that Lötzsch's thesis concluded the book was written in the north-eastern Low Countries, while finding much of the vocabulary unusual for that region; Zwart, using copies Lötzsch had not considered, later judged a north-eastern origin doubtful, but treated the remarks on deviant vocabulary as important.

After the doctorate she worked as a wissenschaftliche Assistentin, a research assistant, at the Humboldt University. The same biography states that she has been on leave since January 1991. In the Bundestag's mandatory disclosure of activity before her membership, the post is listed as wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin at the Humboldt University in Berlin, with a right to return.

Political beginnings and the Berlin parliament

SED membership and the 1989–90 transition

Lötzsch joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), the governing party of the German Democratic Republic, in 1984, during her studies in German and English at Humboldt University of Berlin. Her Bundestag biography records SED membership from 1984 to 1990 and, from 1990, membership of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the SED’s successor. Der Spiegel later described the same career as a continuous rise inside a party that changed from the SED through the PDS to Die Linke.

She has dated her first candidacy to the spring of 1989, when, she told nd, the Kulturbund der DDR asked her to stand on its ticket in the communal elections for Lichtenberg. The vote on 7 May 1989 was the last held on the National Front unity list; the federal government’s chronology of German unity treats it as a falsified election, after observers recorded local counts that diverged from the official result. She then sat in the Lichtenberg district assembly (Bezirksverordnetenversammlung) in 1989–90 and, from May to December 1990, in the city assembly (Stadtverordnetenversammlung) of East Berlin.

She later said the Volkskammer election of 18 March 1990 left her and her husband determined to be more active, and that she served on a joint committee of the eastern and western city parliaments preparing the merger of the two halves of Berlin. On her account, five PDS members took part, the first meeting was at Rathaus Schöneberg before currency union, and much of what the committee discussed was set aside after the all-Berlin election of 2 December 1990.

The Abgeordnetenhaus, 1991–2002

Lötzsch was a member of the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin from 1991 to 2002 and took leave from her research post at Humboldt in January 1991. From 1991 to 1993 she sat on the Berlin PDS state executive and chaired the party’s parliamentary group.

She resigned the chair on the evening of 16 February 1993. taz reported that a circle around the deputy Harald Wolf had criticized shifting lines on Berlin’s Olympic bid and on the capital-city question, and that Lötzsch answered with a paper making the disadvantage of East Berlin a main task of the group. The spokesperson Katharina Grell called it a split between Lötzsch’s “constructive opposition” and Wolf’s “radical opposition.” A week later Peter Zotl defeated her by 10 votes to 8, at a meeting watched by Gregor Gysi, Lothar Bisky and Petra Pau. Lötzsch accused Wolf of a sectarian course and said a parliamentary minority should make policy for the majority; Zotl said the group had been close to breaking up. At a state party congress that May she warned against what she called a “sect of the excluded,” arguing that concrete alternatives would press the governing parties harder than a politics aimed only at losers.

She stayed in the parliament. From 1996 to 2002 she chaired the committee on European and federal affairs and media policy; a Bundestag biography also lists her as deputy chair of the committee on Berlin–Brandenburg cooperation. In February 2000, as PDS media spokesperson, she called plans to close the public-access Offener Kanal “anachronistic” given media concentration; ending it would have required amending the Berlin–Brandenburg media treaty.

On 10 October 1999 the state returning officer recorded her as directly elected in constituency Lichtenberg 4, with 10,280 first votes (48.3 percent), 4,720 votes and 22.2 points ahead of the runner-up. Citywide the PDS took 17.7 percent of second votes, third behind the CDU (40.8 percent) and the SPD (22.4 percent), and 39.5 percent in the east. In Lichtenberg its second-vote share was 44.5 percent, against 40.5 percent in 1995; the same day, 48.2 percent in the Lichtenberg district-assembly election was the PDS’s best borough result, and the party led in every eastern borough. She left the Abgeordnetenhaus in 2002 on entering the Bundestag.

The Lichtenberg district association

From 1994 to 2012 Lötzsch chaired the PDS district association in Berlin-Lichtenberg, continuing after the party became Die Linke, and from 2016 she held the chair again. The association was rooted in one of the PDS’s strongest areas: in 1999 the returning officer placed Lichtenberg, with Hohenschönhausen, Marzahn, Hellersdorf and Friedrichshain, among the eastern boroughs where the party passed 41 percent of second votes.

In November 2016, after district chair and mayoral candidate Evrim Sommer resigned, Lötzsch told nd she would take the office again to bring the quarreling groups together, saying she had not wanted the situation but would not avoid the responsibility. In February 2023 she told Der Tagesspiegel she was giving up the chair of what was by then the Kreisverband, after more than 24 years in all, and that she had wanted to hand it on for some time. The Linke deputy Sebastian Schlüsselburg confirmed the step, and the association set out to reorganize.

Bundestag mandates

Direct elections in Berlin-Lichtenberg

Lötzsch sat in the Bundestag from October 2002 until the end of the 20th electoral period as the directly elected member for the Berlin borough of Lichtenberg. She won the seat six times. The constituency was numbered 87 in 2002, 2005 and 2009, 86 from 2013 through 2021, and 85 at the 2025 election.

On 22 September 2002 she stood for the Party of Democratic Socialism in constituency 87 and received 56,981 first votes, 39.6 percent of the valid ballots. The Social Democratic Party was second with 32.5 percent and the Christian Democratic Union third with 16.9 percent. In the early election of 18 September 2005 the same constituency returned the candidate of Die Linkspartei.PDS, on the ballot as Die Linke., with 62,824 votes, or 42.9 percent. The SPD was again second, at 32.1 percent.

Her highest share was on 27 September 2009. The Berlin state returning officer’s final report, which blanks candidates’ names, records the winner in constituency 87 as the Die Linke member who had sat in the Bundestag since 2002, with 61,874 first votes, 47.4 percent. The SPD followed on 18.4 percent and the CDU on 17.3 percent. The Bundestag biography gives the same 47.4 percent and attributes the win to Lötzsch.

Under the later numbering, the federal returning officer’s tables for Berlin-Lichtenberg show Die Linke’s first votes at 54,932 (40.3 percent) in 2013, 51,249 (34.8 percent) in 2017, and, on the original count of 26 September 2021, 36,813 (25.8 percent), when the SPD was second on 19.6 percent. In 2017 the Alternative for Germany took 15.7 percent of the first votes, behind the CDU. The biography records Lötzsch as re-elected in each of those years at those percentages.

Nationally in 2021 Die Linke took 4.9 percent of second votes. The final allocation nevertheless gave it 39 seats, 36 of them from state lists, so three seats were constituency wins. Der Spiegel later described Lötzsch as one of the three directly elected members whose victories allowed the party into the Bundestag after it had missed the five-percent threshold.

The 2023 split and the 2024 repeat election

On 6 December 2023 the Die Linke Fraktion dissolved. It had 38 members; after several departures it no longer had the 37 required for a parliamentary party, five percent of the then 736-member Bundestag. Its former members, Lötzsch included, became non-attached (fraktionslos). A Fraktion is a full party group, with committee places, initiative and questioning rights, speaking time and public funding. Members below that size may ask to be recognized as a Gruppe, whose narrower rights the plenary sets. Non-attached members keep a speaking right and may sit on one committee in an advisory capacity, without a committee vote.

On 29 November 2023, 28 former members, named in the Council of Elders’ recommendation and including Lötzsch, constituted themselves as Gruppe Die Linke and applied for recognition on 1 December. Ten other former members applied on 12 December to be recognized as the group Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, the alliance associated with Sahra Wagenknecht. On 2 February 2024 the Bundestag recognized both groups. The SPD, the Greens and the FDP voted in favour and the CDU/CSU and the AfD against. Gruppe Die Linke received half a Fraktion’s basic allowance, including the opposition supplement; at most ten major or minor interpellations a month; two current-affairs hours a year; and procedural motions only if at least 37 members supported them. The biography lists Lötzsch as non-attached from 6 December 2023 and as a member of Gruppe Die Linke from 2 February 2024.

The Federal Constitutional Court’s decision of 19 December 2023 required a partial repeat of the 2021 Bundestag election in Berlin within 60 days. It was held on 11 February 2024. In constituency 86 the state returning officer included only six polling districts and three postal districts, 5,850 eligible voters, or 3.0 percent of the constituency, the smallest share in any Berlin Bundestag seat. The corrected final result left Die Linke’s first-vote share unchanged at 25.8 percent; the absolute fell from 36,813 to 36,409. The Bundestag recorded that Lötzsch won the mandate again that day.

Departure ahead of the 2025 election

On 20 June 2024 Lötzsch announced that she would not stand at the next federal election. She said she had made the decision in 2021 and that this was the right moment to publish it.

In the statement reported by Der Spiegel she criticized the party executive. She called the European Parliament election result catastrophic and attributed it to a strategy that reflected the party programme only in part. The executive, she said, had not wanted to talk about peace because it believed the party was divided on the question, and she added that simply not discussing war and peace was not a good strategy. She called the selection of the activist Carola Rackete as a lead candidate a mistake, because the party did not know Rackete and Rackete did not know the party. She also wrote that recent executives had sought new voters while being willing to do without the party’s core electorate. Spiegel noted that, before the split that produced the Wagenknecht alliance, she had argued against expelling Wagenknecht.

The 20th Bundestag was dissolved and the election set for Sunday, 23 February 2025. In Berlin-Lichtenberg, by then constituency 85, Ines Schwerdtner of Die Linke won the direct seat with 52,378 first votes, 34.0 percent. Beatrix von Storch of the AfD was second with 21.9 percent. Lötzsch, whose archived biography covers the 20th electoral period of 2021–2025, did not return for a seventh term.

Co-chair of Die Linke

Election at the 2010 Rostock congress

On 23 January 2010, after a meeting of the party executive in Berlin, Oskar Lafontaine said he would give up the co-chair of Die Linke and his Bundestag seat in May, for health reasons only. He had made a cancer diagnosis public in late November 2009 and had undergone an operation, which he called a warning shot. Lothar Bisky, his co-chair since the 2007 merger of the Party of Democratic Socialism and Labour and Social Justice – The Electoral Alternative, was not standing again either.

The federal congress in Rostock on 15 May 2010 elected Gesine Lötzsch and Klaus Ernst. Lötzsch, then 48 and an East Berlin budget specialist, received 92.8 percent, the highest share yet in a vote for the Linke chair. Ernst, a 55-year-old trade unionist from Bavaria, received 74.9 percent; Heinz-Josef Weich, a local politician from Lower Saxony, took 13.9 percent. Delegates had just amended the statute to keep the dual chair. Ernst’s candidacy was disputed because he was accused of a part in forcing out federal managing director Dietmar Bartsch; 74.9 percent was still treated as a solid result. The pairing put an eastern figure from the PDS milieu beside a western trade unionist.

In her candidate speech Lötzsch promised continuity on a statutory minimum wage, on pensions, and on opposition to the Bundeswehr mission in Afghanistan. Ernst asked for unity after the leadership fight. Lafontaine, given a standing ovation, told delegates not to abandon what he called a successful strategy, above all resistance to cuts in social provision. Three years after its founding the party sat in 13 state parliaments and governed with the Social Democratic Party only in Berlin and Brandenburg.

Tenure and internal disputes

Public quarrels took up much of the term. In early January 2011, during the debate on a new programme, Lötzsch published an essay in Junge Welt, the advance text of a speech for a Berlin conference on “which way to communism?”. She wrote that paths to communism could be found only by trying them, “whether in opposition or in government,” and that there would be many paths rather than one. Der Spiegel noted that the text said nothing critical about crimes committed in communism’s name, and set it against the distance earlier PDS leaderships had kept from the Communist Platform and from the word itself. That row is treated more fully elsewhere.

State results turned the argument toward the chairs. At the election to Berlin’s House of Representatives on 18 September 2011, Die Linke took 11.7 percent of the second votes, 1.7 points below 2006, on the count later certified by the state electoral committee. The SPD–Linke majority that had governed the city was gone. Ernst rejected calls, including from the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern chair Steffen Bockhahn, for an early re-election of the leadership. He said a party that looked divided was unattractive to voters. Lötzsch said quarreling parties seemed to be what voters disliked most. Der Spiegel wrote that recent fights—over Israel, communism, the Berlin Wall, and a message of congratulations to Fidel Castro—had mostly been started by the chairs themselves. Berlin’s lead candidate, Harald Wolf, said those debates had given the city campaign no help.

A separate division concerned state government. Reform-oriented members, stronger in the east, were more willing to join Social Democrats; parts of the western membership preferred strict opposition. That argument was still open when the co-chairs left office.

Resignation in 2012

On the evening of 10 April 2012 Lötzsch resigned with immediate effect. A message circulated by the federal office said that her husband’s illness no longer allowed her to be away from Berlin often; she would concentrate on her Bundestag mandate, and she wished her successor health and success. The next day, in a short statement with no questions, she said her 80-year-old husband was ill “on account of age,” that she had taken him to a Berlin emergency ward on 31 March, and that she would not do things by halves. Der Spiegel described the not-quite-two-year term as one the party regarded as largely unsuccessful.

She had said in October 2011 that she would run again at the June congress; Ernst had not committed himself. He regretted the resignation, said they had worked with trust “in a difficult time,” and asked members not to debate personnel during the state campaigns in Schleswig-Holstein on 6 May and North Rhine-Westphalia on 13 May, where polls then put the party below five percent. He remained the sole acting co-chair until the congress.

The congress met in Göttingen on 2 and 3 June 2012. On 2 June Katja Kipping won the first ballot, open only to women, with 67.1 percent against 29.3 percent for Dora Heyenn. Bernd Riexinger, aligned with Lafontaine’s left trade-union wing, then took 297 votes (53.5 percent) to Bartsch’s 251 (45.2 percent). Sahra Wagenknecht declined to stand. Ernst did not run. Kipping and Riexinger succeeded him and Lötzsch.

Budget policy and committee work

Group offices and committee seats

The Bundestag’s data handbook places Lötzsch, in the 16th Bundestag (2005–2009), among the heads of working circles in the Left group co-chaired by Gregor Gysi and Oskar Lafontaine, not among the deputy chairs. It lists her as a deputy chair only until 16 May 2010, omits that office for the 18th and 19th terms, and records it again, with leadership of Arbeitskreis II, in the 20th term until the faction ended. Her biographies, published as members’ own statements, instead date the budget-policy spokesperson role from 2005 and a deputy chairmanship from September 2005 to April 2012, resumed in 2016.

In the 19th Bundestag she was the group’s spokesperson (Obfrau) on the Budget Committee and a full member of that committee, the Audit Committee and the Mediation Committee. For the 20th term her biography lists full membership of the Budget Committee, the Audit Committee and the subcommittee on foreign cultural and education policy, the Obfrau role on the budget and audit committees, a deputy seat on the Defence Committee, and membership of the Mediation Committee.

Departures left Die Linke short of the 37 members required for a faction, so the group entered liquidation on 6 December 2023 and Lötzsch sat without one. On 2 February 2024 the Bundestag recognized the Gruppe Die Linke and allowed such groups to send full and deputy committee members with the same rights as faction members. The committee’s 2024 brochure still names her Obfrau, now for that group, which held two of 46 seats; from February 2024 the handbook also lists her as a deputy chair of the group and again as head of Arbeitskreis II.

Chair of the Budget Committee, 2014–2017

Her biography records her election as chair of the Budget Committee on 15 January 2014. Custom gives that chair to the largest opposition party; a grand coalition of the CDU/CSU and the SPD left Die Linke in that position, and the party chose the occupant. In December 2013 sixteen CDU and CSU members wrote that she had not distanced herself enough from communism or from the crimes of the SED dictatorship, and individual SPD and Green members also objected. Lötzsch said an oversized coalition should not assign an opposition member’s tasks; Dietmar Bartsch said she would be the candidate because of her record in the field. The Bundestag’s report of the November 2015 budget debate identified her as the chair.

She held the chair through the 18th electoral period. In the next Bundestag the largest opposition group was the Alternative for Germany, and on 31 January 2018, in a sitting chaired by Bundestag president Wolfgang Schäuble, Peter Boehringer was elected chair of the 44-member committee after consensus had been refused. AfD and FDP members voted for him, Die Linke against, and the CDU/CSU, SPD and Alliance 90/The Greens abstained; Lötzsch returned as Obfrau beside Heidrun Bluhm, Michael Leutert and Victor Perli. In the 20th term the CDU/CSU was the largest opposition group, and on 15 December 2021 Helge Braun was elected chair under Bundestag president Bärbel Bas. Of 45 members, two were from Die Linke, Lötzsch and Perli; the 2024 brochure still lists Braun as chair.

Spending priorities

In the closing debate on the 2016 budget—passed on 27 November 2015 by 466 votes to 114, with 316.9 billion euro of spending and no new borrowing—she rejected Finance Minister Schäuble’s case for governing “by sight.” “That is exactly why one cannot govern by sight,” she said: the government had no plan, the claim that higher taxes on companies and the wealthy would cost jobs was a fairy tale, and more revenue should pay for work for the long-term unemployed and for refugees.

On 2 October 2020 she asked Finance Minister Olaf Scholz who would pay the pandemic bill, called retightening the debt brake a route to social cuts, and proposed a wealth levy on billionaires. The “black zero,” she said, had made an investment backlog into an investment crisis; she set 10 billion euro for the Baukindergeld grant against 5 billion for social housing, and called 2 percent of gross domestic product for rearmament “sheer madness.”

On 3 June 2022, during debate on a 100-billion-euro Bundeswehr fund, she asked Finance Minister Christian Lindner how social projects would be paid for if the debt brake returned in 2023, and she called the sum additional debt rather than assets set aside. Excluding it, she put that year’s military budget at 50.4 billion euro, or 55.6 billion on NATO criteria—more, she said, than education, research, family, housing and development cooperation combined. She urged a ceasefire in the war against Ukraine, arguing that a longer war helped Rheinmetall shareholders; Die Linke voted against the fund.

On 5 July 2018 she asked for more investment in eastern Germany, where she said growth in the five eastern states had lagged the national average, and called official “indifference and ignorance toward eastern Germany” no longer bearable. A motion she introduced on 27 November 2023, after the Federal Constitutional Court had barred the coalition’s use of special funds around the debt brake, called the brake an investment brake and set nearly 90 billion euro of NATO-criteria defence spending against cuts in humanitarian aid and delay of a climate payment and a full child basic income.

Political positions

Social and economic policy

Lötzsch has described her aim as democratic socialism, not communism. In January 2011, replying to criticism of an essay in Junge Welt (see Controversies), she told Welt am Sonntag that she was “not a communist, but a democratic socialist,” called communism a “utopian ideology” she could not then imagine, and said the party rejected the crimes of Stalinism and crimes committed in communism’s name.

On 24 November 2022 she told the Bundestag that Hartz IV, from the Agenda 2010 laws, was “poverty by law” and had to be replaced. She called Gerhard Schröder’s boast of Europe’s largest low-wage sector fatal: a million people in regular jobs, she said, still topped up their wages. Bürgergeld improved some rules, so her Die Linke group did not reject the law, but mediation made it worse, and €53 more a month did not offset a 20 percent rise in food prices; she cited a Paritätischer Wohlfahrtsverband rate of €725.

On 30 September 2010 she said policy had made eastern Germany a “Hartz IV country”—15 percent of the population and 34 percent of recipients—and asked how many Monday demonstrators of 1989 now lived on the benefit. In 2010 she told taz that red-green governments had widened low pay and that a statutory minimum wage was a first step toward equal pay for women. On 3 June 2022 she backed a rise to €12 but said €13 was already required, and urged a federal rent cap as energy, food and rents rose. In September 2021 she wrote that a rent cap belonged in federal law and that expropriation under “Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen” would not damage the stock, because rent could repay loans rather than shareholders, with municipal firms and cooperatives as securer landlords.

In January 2022 she called the debt brake an “economic wrong turn,” tenable only by burdening people who need benefits. She proposed a wealth levy on 0.7 percent of the population instead, and called Christian Lindner’s shift of €60 billion in credit authorizations into the climate fund a device to obey the brake formally.

Foreign and security policy

On 11 November 2010 she said NATO could not be reformed: it promised security and delivered insecurity. She demanded immediate Bundeswehr withdrawal from Afghanistan—freedom, she said, was not defended at the Hindu Kush, and war on terror created new terror—and removal of U.S. nuclear weapons from Germany. In January 2022 she called NATO’s 2 percent military-spending target “absolutely nonsensical.”

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine she wrote that more weapons had not brought peace but a war of attrition borne especially by people in Ukraine, so continuing the war was irresponsible and a ceasefire had to be negotiated. On 11 September 2024 she answered Defence Minister Boris Pistorius’s call to make Germany “kriegstüchtig” (fit for war) with “friedenstüchtig” (fit for peace)—“butter instead of cannons.” A new nursery in her Berlin-Lichtenberg constituency had cost €6.5 million, she said, against €27.5 million for a Leopard tank. She supported Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s proposal for a peace conference including Russia to end “Russia’s war against Ukraine.”

In June 2024 she blamed part of the European-election result on an executive that “did not want to talk about peace, because our party would be split on this question,” and called silence on war and peace a bad strategy. The party had to be recognizable again as a peace party, she wrote; choosing Carola Rackete as a lead candidate was a mistake because neither the party nor Rackete knew the other.

East Germany after reunification

In October 2024 Lötzsch described 1989 as euphoria that turned. Reform of socialism was still the demand on 4 November at Alexanderplatz and in the appeal “Für unser Land,” which sought an independent East Germany as a “socialist alternative to the Federal Republic”; “We are the people” then became “We are one people.” An attempt at equal unification, rather than accession under Article 23, ended, she said, when the Alliance for Germany won the Volkskammer election of 18 March 1990.

Gaps in wages, incomes and pensions remained unacceptable, and eastern Germans were scarce in leading jobs; a report by the federal commissioner for eastern Germany, she said, showed their share had fallen. Since 1990, she said, many had been jobless, pushed into low pay, lost property, or faced poverty in old age. “The worst thing, though, is the arrogance of West Germans toward East Germans.” She rejected “the East is brown” as a stigma: the AfD, she said, was not the voice of the East—its leaders came mostly from the West—and exploited eastern disappointment.

She traced Die Linke’s weak 2024 results in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg to a split she had failed to stop—it was “a great error” to expect Sahra Wagenknecht’s departure to revive the party—and to a blurred line on peace and neglect of eastern voters.

Controversies

The 2011 essay on paths to communism

On 3 January 2011, as co-chair of Die Linke, Lötzsch published “Wege zum Kommunismus” in junge Welt, which Der Spiegel called Marxist, ahead of the paper’s Rosa Luxemburg Conference in Berlin. Its central line was that the paths to communism could be found only by setting out and trying them, in opposition or in government. Welt am Sonntag quoted her calling that path “very long and stony”; Die Welt reported that the essay closed by naming democratic socialism. She later said she had meant Rosa Luxemburg, who never made her peace with Soviet-style party communism.

CSU general secretary Alexander Dobrindt said she stood outside the constitution and that communism as a party goal attacked the free democratic order; he demanded nationwide observation by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. CDU general secretary Hermann Gröhe called a “scandalous longing for communism” a slap in the face of its victims. SPD parliamentary manager Thomas Oppermann labeled her a “Fernziel-Kommunistin,” and Wolfgang Thierse spoke of communism’s “bloody trail.” FDP deputy Jens Ackermann called her an intellectual arsonist who encouraged the far left to trample democratic values. Renate Künast of Alliance 90/The Greens found the remarks “slightly irritating” and opposed surveillance, saying she did not believe the party threatened the Federal Republic’s existence. Gregor Gysi called the wording unfortunate, said crimes committed in communism’s name had to be mentioned, and stated that the party “is not a communist party and will not become one.” Oskar Lafontaine said it was reform-socialist, not communist.

Lötzsch called the Union reaction hysterical and cited an irrevocable break with Stalinism and an apology to its victims. On 8 January she cancelled a panel, “Wo bitte geht’s zum Kommunismus?”, with former Red Army Faction member Inge Viett and German Communist Party chair Bettina Jürgensen, and instead told the conference: “My name is Gesine Lötzsch and I am a democratic socialist.” She told Welt am Sonntag she was “not a communist, but a democratic socialist,” that distance from those crimes was founding consensus, and that she “cannot imagine communism now at all.”

Her husband’s Stasi file

In March 2010 Die Welt reported from files of the federal Stasi records authority, then the Birthler authority, that her husband, the Slavist Ronald Lötzsch, had been an unofficial collaborator. A handwritten undertaking of 29 March 1962, under the cover name “Heinz,” pledged conscientious work, honest reports to the Ministry for State Security, and silence even by hint. Welt reported 19 handwritten reports, a 457-page file archived in August 1985, and more than 100 meetings, with a handler praising conscientious work mainly against linguists judged politically negative, and no pressure at recruitment. Erich Loest said the two were arrested together in 1957 in the Schröder-Lucht group and called the disclosure disgusting. Der Spiegel, citing the same papers, reported a Halle district-court sentence on 23 December 1958 and release on 8 November 1960. Welt added that the register note was deleted in 1964, that the SED readmitted him in 1969, and that the couple married in 1987, after the Stasi had stopped using him; Der Tagesspiegel, citing Welt, placed the end in the mid-1980s.

On 7 April 2006 she told the Bundestag that he had spent three years in Bautzen for political reasons and had been compensated for unjust imprisonment, without mentioning later Stasi work. In 2010 she said she would resist misuse of his fate for “transparent campaigns,” had nothing to retract, did not know the files, and was the politician while he was a private man. Hubertus Knabe, director of the Hohenschönhausen memorial, spoke of “quite a portion of cheek” in presenting him as a victim after more than 20 years as an informer. The authority said it had no indication of any Stasi collaboration by Gesine Lötzsch herself. Deputy chair Klaus Ernst said she, not her husband, was the candidate.

Former Stasi personnel in her political circle

For 5 October 2008 the Lichtenberg association invited Werner Großmann, last head of Stasi foreign intelligence, to speak on the “founding fathers of the German intelligence services after the Second World War.” Lötzsch defended the event as history, asked for “a new sobriety” about the GDR 19 years after the Wall, and said banning it was no solution. Knabe demanded cancellation and called it a second platform for views he regarded as historical-revisionist. Großmann then withdrew, citing illness; former colonels Klaus Eichner and Gotthold Schramm appeared instead. Knabe said both were active in revisionist groups, including a “Stasi insider committee,” and SPD deputy Andreas Köhler called the change a worsening and said Lötzsch should be ashamed. Welt reported that she argued former Stasi members could sit in parliaments and ministries, and that a Green parliamentarian had called her the “holy Joan of the old Chekists.” In that debate she was quoted, of former unofficial collaborators, as saying “Whoever is elected is elected.”

In January 2011 the Berlin tabloid B.Z. reported, and Welt said it had seen the file, that Bundestag office manager Klaus Singer served from 1978 to 1981 in the guard regiment “Feliks Dzierzynski,” in its cipher service—membership that automatically made him a full-time ministry employee. As Welt described the file, Major General Fritz Renckwitz proposed him to minister Erich Mielke on 22 December 1977 instead of ordinary army service; his father, Rudi Singer, sat on the SED Central Committee. He was classed as a bearer of secrets for only three years after leaving, and the archived file was read as a sign he did not later become an unofficial collaborator. Lötzsch and Singer did not comment. Gysi called the regiment “a form of military service” with “nothing to do with spying.” Historian Klaus Schroeder said most members were extremely loyal to the system, though cases differed.

Writings, affiliations and personal life

Publications

In 2017 Eulenspiegel Verlag in Berlin published Gesine Lötzsch’s Immer schön auf Augenhöhe. The German National Library catalogues the hardcover, ISBN 978-3-359-01732-5, as 158 pages, and a separate ebook under ISBN 978-3-359-50067-4. The publisher describes an illustrated book of anecdotes, not a full autobiography, about day-to-day work in the Bundestag, budget figures, and the habit of treating eastern Germany as if it were still abroad.

On 11 April 2017 the Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus presented the book in a conversation with the journalist Alfred Eichhorn. Its announcement cited stories such as speaking from behind the chancellor and a nickname for a political opponent, and linked the title’s “eye level” to how she wanted politics conducted; it also noted that she had sat in the Bundestag since 2002 and had chaired the Budget Committee for about two years.

The national bibliography lists shorter works she edited or introduced. In 2006 a 63-page booklet, Was tun gegen Rechtsextremisten?, appeared under her name from the Bundestag address at Platz der Republik 1. In 2011 Neues Deutschland published Alles auf den Prüfstand! Texte zur DDR-Geschichte im „Neuen Deutschland“, 153 pages, with her as editor, and in 2012 she contributed a foreword to Kathrin Gerlof and Rico Prauss, Die Kommunalen. LINKE im Land: 16 Geschichten aus Rathäusern und Gemeinden (VSA, Hamburg). The index of Utopie kreativ, held by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, lists three pieces by her: the 1993 Ash Wednesday speech “Alpträume?” (issues 27/28), “Zukunft konkreter Politik” (issue 170) and “Aschermittwoch 2006” (issue 187).

Organizations and local roles

For the 2021–2025 Bundestag term she declared herself an elected member of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung; the foundation’s membership list includes her. The biography, which the Bundestag says is drawn from members’ own statements, also lists the Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft (GEW) and the Bund demokratischer Wissenschaftlerinnen (BdWi).

The same filings record unpaid posts in Lichtenberg: honorary chair of Gemeinsam in Lichtenberg e.V., chair of Zivilcourage vereint e.V. until 7 June 2022, and a board seat at the Harald-Breuer-Stiftung until 10 October 2023. She further listed the cooperatives Vorwärts and Weiberwirtschaft, the Goethe-Institut, the friends’ circles of the Parkaue and the B.L.O. Ateliers, the support association of the Naturschutzstation Malchow, and the support association of Tierpark and Zoo Berlin.

Family

In 1987, during research studies at Humboldt University of Berlin, Lötzsch married the linguist Ronald Lötzsch (1 October 1931 – 16 June 2018). The Tagesspiegel wrote that she had met him there as her professor, stayed on for the research degree, married in 1987 and received her doctorate in 1988. The national library records him as a linguist, university teacher and Esperantist. A Leibniz-Sozietät obituary describes Russian and other Slavic studies in Leningrad (1951–1956), work from 1961 at the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin, a 1962 doctorate on the Sorbian dual, completion of Hans Holm Bielfeldt’s German–Russian academy dictionary, a Yiddish dictionary (1990/92), and lead editorship of the Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung (from 1993 Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung). From 1993 to 1995 he held the Sorbian linguistics chair at Leipzig University and directed its Institute of Sorabistik; the society elected him in 1997. The obituary states that he was jailed in 1957 for alleged aiding of treason, released in 1960, and then worked for a time as a builder’s labourer and freelance translator.

The Bundestag biography lists her as a widow with two children. In April 2012 she resigned as co-chair of Die Linke after her husband, then 80, fell ill; she said the illness came with age, that she had taken him to a Berlin emergency department on 31 March, and that she could no longer be away from the city as often as the office required. He died on 16 June 2018, aged 86. The Tagesspiegel recorded that, after imprisonment, he had for some years agreed to work for the Stasi; that dispute is treated with the controversies over his file.