Gökay Akbulut

Gökay Akbulut (born 1982 in Pınarbaşı, Turkey) is a German social scientist and a politician of Die Linke who has sat in the Bundestag since 2017. She is elected on the Baden-Württemberg state list and stands as the party's candidate in constituency 275, Mannheim. In the biography published by the Bundestag from her own disclosures, she describes herself as Alevi and unmarried, and her occupation is given as social scientist.

She took the Abitur in June 2003 at Gymnasium Hamm in Hamburg and, from October 2003 to September 2008, studied political science at Heidelberg University, with international relations and the European Union as her specialisms. From January to March 2007 she was a spring intern at United Nations headquarters in New York, in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for the Advancement of Women. Before parliament she coordinated a youth project in Berlin, taught civics in Ludwigshafen, worked part-time on a Heidelberg school-to-work scheme for pupils with a migration background, lectured in politics and German at the Mannheim Abendakademie, and from April 2016 to April 2017 advised the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Stuttgart on education and migration. She joined Die Linke in Baden-Württemberg in 2006, served on the Mannheim district executive from 2010 to 2012, on the state executive from 2012 to 2025, and on the Mannheim city council from 2014 to 2018.

Her Bundestag biography lists membership of the Die Linke Fraktion from 2017 to 2024, of the party's parliamentary Gruppe from 2023 to 2025, and of the Fraktion again from March 2025. In Mannheim, Die Linke received 6,811 first votes (4.8 percent) and 7,066 second votes (5.0 percent) in 2021, and 12,117 first votes (8.0 percent) and 17,211 second votes (11.3 percent) in 2025. The current biography names her as the party's candidate in that constituency; under the reformed electoral law the Mannheim seat was left vacant in 2025 for want of second-vote coverage, and she entered through the state list. In the 21st Bundestag she is a full member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, a deputy member of the subcommittee on crisis prevention, strategic foresight, stabilization and peacebuilding, and deputy chair of the ASEAN parliamentary group.

Coverage of her politics has centered on migration and on Kurdish affairs. The Bundestag biography records membership, since 2010, of Kurdish organizations including the Kurdish Center for Public Relations, the Kurdish women's association Ceni and the Kurd-Akad network, alongside the education union GEW, Attac, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and the Alevi community in Mannheim. Tagesschau has described her as a long-standing advocate for Kurds and for lifting Germany's ban on the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which has been prohibited in Germany since 1993 and is treated as a terrorist organization in Turkey, Europe and the United States.

In November 2017 Focus, citing Berlin security sources, reported that she was registered in NADIS, the information system of the domestic intelligence service (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), over alleged contacts with Kurdish associations close to the banned PKK, and that the entries listed her as responsible for a Kurdish cultural festival in Mannheim in September 2012 at which police officers were injured. She did not comment to the magazine; the Mannheim police director at the time, Dieter Schäfer, told Focus that she had not apologized to injured officers and that she did not stand on constitutional ground. On 3 August 2023, according to her office as reported by Tagesschau, she was held for several hours after landing at Antalya on a warrant alleging "terror propaganda" over 2019 social-media criticism of Turkey's military offensive in northern Syria, and was released around 21:30. Tagesschau, citing the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, reported that the federal government had pressed "at a high level, emphatically and through several channels" for her release.

In late January 2025 she said that other passengers had attacked and racially insulted her on a Deutsche Bahn intercity train; fellow travelers said the aggression had come from her, and prosecutors investigated her as well. The Stuttgart district court confirmed to SWR a penalty order of 120 daily rates of 430 euros — 51,600 euros — including for attempted dangerous bodily harm, on the allegation that she had filmed fellow passengers and thrown a wine bottle that missed. Her Mannheim office told SWR that she had objected only to the size of the daily rate, so the order was not yet final; a 41-year-old fellow passenger had already been fined, in a final order, 100 daily rates of 40 euros for dangerous bodily harm committed together with insult.

Early life and education

Childhood and migration to Germany

Gökay Akbulut was born on 16 November 1982 in Pınarbaşı, Turkey. The Bundestag biography gives that place and the year 1982 and describes her as Alevi; the full date is in the parliament’s structured profile data. She comes from a Kurdish Alevi family, as a 2021 profile in the Schwäbische Zeitung also reported, and in a Goethe-Institut interview she said she has two brothers.

A Goethe-Institut interview script, based on a conversation with her, states that she began primary school in Turkey in 1988, when Kurdish was forbidden in school, while the family continued to speak Kurdish as well as Turkish at home.

She has dated the move to Germany to 1990. In that interview she said her parents left partly for economic and partly for political reasons, that the family spent about six months in a refugee shelter before being assigned a flat, and that she then entered the second grade. In a November 2015 speech to a Die Linke state congress in Baden-Württemberg she described the departure as political and said her parents, like many other Kurds, applied for asylum in Germany. An archived Bundestag biography states that she has lived in Germany since 1990.

The Goethe-Institut account places the family’s first home near Uelzen in Lower Saxony, where few other children had a migration background. She said about half a year of German lessons, shared with roughly ten to twelve children, came before regular classes, and that after about a year she could follow ordinary teaching. At home, she said, the siblings spoke increasingly German with one another, Turkish with their parents, and the parents Kurdish between themselves. She recalled anxiety about speaking in class in the first months, and a sense of being out of place because she looked and sounded different; she said that eased once she had friends.

School and university

In Lower Saxony she went through the state’s then orientation stage in the fifth and sixth grades, with English from the fifth grade and French from the seventh. She has said she was not recommended for the Gymnasium. The Schwäbische Zeitung quoted her calling that decision frustrating and disappointing and describing her school years as the hardest struggle of her life; she enrolled on the university-preparatory track anyway. She later lived in Hamburg, where she told the Goethe-Institut her circle of friends became more international, and in June 2003 she passed the Abitur at Gymnasium Hamm there.

From October 2003 to September 2008 she studied at Heidelberg University. Bundestag biographies list political science as her main subject, with emphasis on international relations and the European Union, together with sociology and public law, and record the qualification as a Magister (M.A.). The Schwäbische Zeitung dates the Magister to 2008. In the 2015 speech she said her own emphases were international relations and inequality in education, and that her Magister thesis analysed challenges facing the United Nations and what she called their instrumentalization.

During the degree she spent a semester at Concordia University in Montreal. From January to March 2007 she held a place on the United Nations Spring Internship Program at headquarters in New York City, in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for the Advancement of Women. The 19th-term Bundestag biography also lists a 2006 internship in a Die Linke members’ office at the Bundestag in Berlin and part-time work as a waitress and in a call centre; in the 2015 speech she identified that office as Heike Hänsel’s.

Professional work before parliament

Youth and education projects

The Bundestag biography of Gökay Akbulut, which the parliament says rests on the member's own information, lists paid work in youth support, vocational preparation and teaching from April 2009 to April 2017. The contracts themselves are not confirmed in any other publication found.

From April 2009 to January 2010 she is listed as project coordinator at KHS Kirchhofschmiede gGmbH in Berlin, in socio-pedagogical support of young people. Register summaries describe that non-profit company, Amtsgericht Charlottenburg HRB 25823 B, founded in 1986, as supporting unemployed young people disadvantaged in entering work, including through vocational preparation, youth welfare and migrant integration, in cooperation with public bodies and the European Social Fund.

From January 2010 to January 2011 she is listed as a freelance lecturer for the Christliches Jugenddorfwerk Deutschlands (CJD) in Ludwigshafen, teaching civics and job-application training in berufsvorbereitende Bildungsmaßnahmen (BvB). The CJD, a non-profit association founded in 1947 by the Protestant pastor Arnold Dannenmann, provides schooling, vocational training and youth and family services at more than 350 sites. BvB measures are Federal Employment Agency programmes, run by certified providers, for young people past compulsory schooling who lack a first vocational qualification and need help choosing or starting an apprenticeship, including application training and, in some cases, a route to a Hauptschulabschluss.

From February 2011 to May 2015 she is listed as a part-time project worker at the Jugendagentur eG in Heidelberg on a European Social Fund project on the school-to-work transition for pupils with a migration background. That project title appears only in the self-report. The cooperative, non-profit since 2009 on its own account, says it supports young people in that transition in order to reduce youth unemployment, and the city of Heidelberg describes the same role. The Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs describes the European Social Fund Plus as the European Union's main instrument for employment and social inclusion, focused on young people entering training or work and on migrants, and says it finances projects rather than placing people in jobs.

Lecturing and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation

From November 2012 to April 2016, overlapping the Heidelberg post, she is listed as a freelance lecturer at the Mannheimer Abendakademie und Volkshochschule GmbH, in politics and German-language support. The Abendakademie is Mannheim's centre for adult education. Since 1980 it has been a limited company, Amtsgericht Mannheim HRB 2816, owned by the city and Volkshochschul-Kuratorium e.V. Its programme includes German as a second language, work-related German, and society and politics.

From April 2016 to April 2017 she is listed as Referentin für Bildung und Migration, adviser on education and migration, at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg. The Political Foundations Financing Act recognises Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Gesellschaftsanalyse und politische Bildung e.V. as the political foundation close to Die Linke and requires such foundations to remain legally and factually independent of that party. The Federal Agency for Civic Education describes their tasks as civic education, research support, scholarships and policy advice. In Baden-Württemberg, Forum für Bildung und Analyse in Baden-Württemberg e.V., founded at the end of 1996 and based in Stuttgart, says it is the Land foundation of the national body, and that a regional office of the national foundation has been in Stuttgart since 2006 to support it. The biography does not say which of the two employed her.

Local politics in Mannheim and Baden-Württemberg

City council

According to the biography published by the German Bundestag, which rests on her own disclosures, Gökay Akbulut has been a member of Die Linke in Baden-Württemberg since 2006 and sat on the executive of the party's Mannheim district association from 2010 to 2012. The same account lists, from 2010, membership of Mannheim sagt Ja e.V. and of the Alevi community in Mannheim among her associations.

At the municipal election on 25 May 2014, Die Linke received 232,285 votes, 6.2 percent of all valid votes in Mannheim, and three council seats. Akbulut, with 10,685 personal votes, was ahead of the party's other two successful candidates, Thomas Trüper (10,233) and Julien Ferrat (9,370). The Mannheim city archive lists her as a member of the Gemeinderat from 25 May 2014 until 26 June 2018, when Nalan Erol succeeded her. In the archived biography for the 19th Bundestag she reported serving on the committee for security and public order, the committee for education and health, and the integration committee. Disclosures for that term also record that the council seat, and a seat on the administrative board of the Mannheimer Abendakademie, both ended on 26 June 2018.

State executive and the 2016 Landtag election

Her Bundestag biography dates membership of the state executive of Die Linke in Baden-Württemberg from 2012 to 2025. The lists published by the state party place her, identified with the Mannheim district, on the extended executive for 2021–2023 and again for 2023–2025, rather than on the smaller managing board.

On 19 June 2015 the Berlin daily taz reported that Bernd Riexinger, then federal co-chair of Die Linke, had announced in Stuttgart that he would lead the campaign for the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg election of 13 March 2016, with Akbulut, then 32 and a Mannheim city councillor, as the other half of a lead pair intended to clear the five-percent threshold. A state party congress in the Sängerhalle in Stuttgart-Untertürkheim confirmed the two unanimously on 21 November 2015. Neues Deutschland reported that, in her congress speech, Akbulut warned against holding refugees and migrants responsible for social conditions.

Voters cast a single vote for one constituency candidate. Seventy direct seats were awarded, and at least 50 further seats went to the strongest unsuccessful candidates of parties included in the proportional distribution; overhang and leveling seats then raised the chamber from a minimum of 120 members to 143. The state returning officer admitted a Die Linke nomination in all 70 constituencies. In constituency 35—Mannheim I on the official ballot, and Mannheim Nord in the city's result tables—the ballot named Akbulut, a social scientist living in Mannheim, with the electronics technician Roland Schuster as substitute.

Die Linke received 2,734 of 53,384 valid votes there, 5.1 percent, on a turnout of 58.8 percent. The largest share, 23.0 percent (12,264 votes), went to the Alternative for Germany candidate Rüdiger Klos; the Social Democratic Party, Alliance 90/The Greens, the Christian Democratic Union and the Free Democratic Party also finished ahead of Die Linke. In the city's southern constituency the party took 4.5 percent, and 4.8 percent across Mannheim as a whole.

The final statewide result, certified by the state returning officer on 1 April 2016, gave Die Linke 156,240 votes, 2.9 percent of 5,361,250 valid votes, up from 2.8 percent (139,700 votes) in 2011. Turnout was 70.4 percent. The Landtag's 143 seats went to the Greens (30.3 percent, 47 seats), the CDU (27.0 percent, 42), the AfD (15.1 percent, 23), the SPD (12.7 percent, 19) and the FDP (8.3 percent, 12). Die Linke was not among the parties allocated seats.

Bundestag candidacies and election results

The 2017 election

Delegates of Die Linke in Baden-Württemberg adopted the state list for the 2017 federal election on 28 January 2017 in Stuttgart. Bernd Riexinger was placed first and Heike Hänsel second; Gökay Akbulut, then a city councillor in Mannheim, took list place 3 and was also the constituency candidate in Wahlkreis 275. On 24 September 2017 she received 10,493 first votes, 7.4 percent, 0.7 percentage points above the party's 2013 constituency share. Die Linke's second votes there were 12,989, or 9.1 percent, up 1.6 points. The constituency seat went to Nikolas Löbel of the CDU, who led the first vote with 29.3 percent. Statewide the party polled 380,727 second votes (6.4 percent) and was allocated six seats, all list mandates; it won none of the Land's 38 constituencies. The official roll of those elected from the Baden-Württemberg list records Akbulut on place 3, after Riexinger and Hänsel and before Tobias Pflüger, Jessica Tatti and Michel Brandt. She entered the 19th Bundestag on that list mandate.

The 2021 election and the parliamentary group

At a state delegate meeting on 9 May 2021 in Leinfelden-Echterdingen, Die Linke elected Riexinger to list place 1 with 82 percent of the vote and Akbulut to place 2 with 78 percent. In Mannheim on 26 September 2021 she received 6,811 first votes (4.8 percent, down 2.5 points from 2017) and the party 7,066 second votes (5.0 percent, down 4.1 points). Isabel Cademartori Dujisin of the SPD won the constituency with 26.4 percent of the first vote. Across Baden-Württemberg Die Linke fell to 196,874 second votes, 3.3 percent, and to three seats, again without a constituency win. The seats went to the first three on the list: Riexinger, Akbulut and Tatti.

Nationally the party took 4.9 percent of the second vote and 39 seats in a Bundestag of 736 members: 36 from lists and three constituency seats. Through the 2021 election, parties that missed the five-percent threshold were still included in the allocation of list seats if they had won a seat in at least three constituencies, the Grundmandatsklausel. In the 20th Bundestag that full status did not last. The Fraktion Die Linke, then 38 members, fell below the minimum of 37 after several deputies left; on 6 December 2023 it entered liquidation, and its members sat without a Fraktion. On 2 February 2024 the Bundestag recognized 28 of them, who had applied to President Bärbel Bas on 1 December 2023, as the Gruppe Die Linke, and ten others, who had applied on 12 December, as the group of the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht. Akbulut's Bundestag biography, drawn from her own information, records membership of the Fraktion Die Linke from 2017 to 2024, of the Gruppe Die Linke from 2023 to 2025, and of the Fraktion again from March 2025.

The 2025 election

On 21 December 2024, state delegates meeting in Leinfelden-Echterdingen placed Sahra Mirow first with 83.1 percent, Luigi Pantisano second with 75.6 percent and Akbulut third with 89.5 percent. At the election on 23 February 2025 she received 12,117 first votes in Mannheim, 8.0 percent, 3.1 points more than in 2021. Die Linke's second votes in the constituency were 17,211, or 11.3 percent, up 6.3 points. The CDU led the first vote with 24.7 percent and the SPD was second with 22.5 percent, but the Federal Returning Officer's result states that the constituency stayed vacant for want of sufficient Zweitstimmendeckung, or coverage by second votes. Under the rule applied in 2025, a first-vote plurality produces a seat only if the party's second-vote entitlement in the Land covers it: plurality winners of a party are ranked by first-vote share, and the Land's seats are assigned in that order.

In Baden-Württemberg Die Linke won 429,484 second votes, 6.8 percent. The Land returning officer's list of those provisionally elected names six Die Linke members, all from the state list: Mirow, Pantisano, Akbulut, Vinzenz Glaser, Anne Zerr and Marcel Bauer, on places 1 to 6. The Federal Electoral Committee's final result of 14 March 2025 left the distribution of seats unchanged from the preliminary count. The state statistical office counted six deputies of Die Linke among the 79 members returned from Baden-Württemberg and listed Mannheim among six constituencies in the Land that remained unfilled. Nationally the party received 8.8 percent of the second vote and 64 seats, six of them constituency seats.

Committee work and parliamentary roles

Spokesperson portfolios

Specialist spokesperson posts in the German Bundestag are assigned by a parliamentary group, not by the House. In May 2019 the Bundestag’s reporting described Gökay Akbulut as the migration and integration policy spokesperson of the Die Linke group, in an interview on the skilled-worker immigration bill. In August 2023 the Handelsblatt identified her as that group’s spokesperson for migration, family policy and civic engagement, and as a member of the family-affairs committee.

For the 20th electoral term (2021–2025) the archived biography lists her as Obfrau of the Committee on Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth and of its Subcommittee on Civic Engagement. An Obfrau or Obmann is a group’s main contact on a committee and helps set its line there; each group has one per committee. After the Die Linke group was dissolved, the biography records her as without a group from 6 December 2023 and, from 2 February 2024, a member of the Gruppe Die Linke. The group’s roster of specialist spokespersons for the 21st term does not name her: foreign policy is assigned to Cansu Özdemir, international relations to Lea Reisner, and development policy to Charlotte Neuhäuser.

Committees

In the 19th term (2017–2021) the archived biography lists her as a full member of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection and of its Subcommittee on European Law, and as a deputy member of the family-affairs committee, the Committee on the Interior and Community, and the Wahlausschuss. The legal-affairs committee covers civil and criminal legislation and consumer protection; the European-law subcommittee follows projects of the European Union. The interior committee runs from migration and asylum to civil protection and oversees the interior ministry. The Wahlausschuss proposes judges of the Federal Constitutional Court for election by the plenary. She is also listed as a Schriftführerin. Secretaries are elected at the start of a term, and two of them assist the President in the plenary presidium.

In the 20th term she was a full member of the family-affairs committee and the Subcommittee on Civic Engagement, and a deputy member of the Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid and of the Children’s Commission (Kommission zur Wahrnehmung der Belange der Kinder). From the 21st term, family affairs share a committee with education. The Bundestag describes its work as covering families, children and young people, work and family life, equality, and education policy.

At the constitution of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development on 21 May 2025, Akbulut and Charlotte Neuhäuser were named as Die Linke’s two members of the 18-member committee, which deals with development cooperation. The Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung reported on 24 November 2025 that she was moving to the Foreign Affairs Committee. Her biography for the 21st term, as published in October 2026, lists her as a full member of that committee and a deputy member of its Subcommittee on Crisis Prevention, Strategic Foresight, Stabilisation and Peacebuilding, and no longer lists development. Under Article 45a of the Basic Law, the Foreign Affairs Committee accompanies government foreign policy and takes the lead on deployments of the Bundeswehr abroad. When the subcommittee was constituted on 16 October 2025, Neuhäuser was the full member for Die Linke and Akbulut the substitute. It is charged with strategic foresight in foreign and security policy and with accompanying the National Security Council in the Chancellery.

Interparliamentary groups

Parliamentarian groups are cross-party associations, reconstituted each term, for contact with parliaments abroad; they are not committees. In the 21st term, 47 groups cover 180 countries, and each board may include one deputy chair from every parliamentary group that does not hold the chair.

In August 2023 the Handelsblatt reported that Akbulut was deputy chair of the German–Turkish parliamentarian group and of the German–South Caucasus group. A Die Linke minor interpellation printed on 22 November 2023 described her, in the questioners’ preamble, as deputy chair of the German–Turkish group. A Bundestag board list of 12 July 2024 no longer includes a Die Linke deputy on either body: Max Lucks (Greens) chaired the German–Turkish group, with deputies from the SPD, CDU/CSU, FDP and AfD, and Johann David Wadephul (CDU/CSU) chaired the South Caucasus group, whose partners the list names as Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Her 21st-term biography lists her as deputy chair of the parliamentarian group for ASEAN.

Migration, integration and social policy

Asylum, immigration and the Global Compact for Migration

As migration and integration spokeswoman of the Die Linke group in the Bundestag, Akbulut argued for entry beyond labour-market selection. In May 2019 she told the Bundestag weekly Das Parlament that the skilled-worker bill served companies, called recruitment of the highly qualified “Rosinenpickerei”, and backed a “Spurwechsel” from toleration (Duldung) to a securer status with the right to work. In a taz interview on the 2018 clash at a centre in Ellwangen, she blamed the Dublin Regulation, called non-violent solidarity against deportations legitimate, and said Die Linke wanted a right to remain for everyone.

The main parliamentary dispute was the United Nations Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. On 8 November 2018, against an Alternative for Germany motion, Akbulut said the AfD had swapped “Merkel muss weg” for a fear campaign, that Germany would support the compact in Marrakesh, and that its non-binding form was a weakness where it spoke of equal rights. Sevim Dağdelen, also speaking for Die Linke, welcomed the talks but criticised the silence on free trade and arms exports. Alexander Gauland warned of welfare immigration and lost sovereignty; the CDU/CSU said closer standards abroad would ease pressure on Germany.

The compact split the Left group. Der Spiegel reported that before a meeting on 27 November 2018 Akbulut, described as an opponent of co-chair Sahra Wagenknecht, circulated a text on protection from disenfranchisement, exploitation and inhuman conditions. Dağdelen and Heike Hänsel urged the group not to agree to the draft then circulating, calling it fitted to northern industry and a route for “Nützlichkeitseinwanderung” in the interest of capital. Participants told Spiegel that a majority backed a softened text that still asked the government to approve the compact, while stressing criticism and causes of flight. Wagenknecht and eleven others abstained; on an earlier wording vote she and ten others voted no, with about 60 members present.

Drucksache 19/6101, naming Dietmar Bartsch and Akbulut among the sponsors, welcomed the rights approach but called it non-justiciable and thin on causes of flight. It asked Berlin to vote yes while seeking a “right not to have to migrate”, family reunification without income or language tests, and a civilian EU sea rescue. On 29 November the House rejected it. The chair announced the SPD, CDU/CSU, FDP and AfD against Die Linke and Alliance 90/The Greens, with no abstentions; Britta Haßelmann later declared in writing that the Green vote was an abstention. A coalition motion to back the compact and to “regeln und steuern” migration passed by 372 votes to 153, with 141 abstentions.

On 28 May 2020 she moved a naturalisation offensive: multiple nationality as the rule, citizenship by birth in Germany, and a right to naturalise after five lawful years. She spoke of a 17.3-year average wait and more than 10 million people without a vote. Michael Kuffer (CDU/CSU) said the Greens and the Left treated citizenship casually and that dual nationality must stay exceptional. In August 2019 Spiegel reported her question on the EU–Turkey arrangement. The government knew of reported returns of Syrians from Turkey toward Idlib but noted Ankara’s denial and that the UN refugee agency could not verify them. Akbulut called that evasive and said Turkey was not a reliable partner for Germany and the European Union; Ulla Jelpke opposed further cooperation with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on keeping refugees out.

Family, gender and education

After a suspension dating from 2016, the coalition restored nuclear-family reunification for people with subsidiary protection only inside a quota of 1,000 people a month from August 2018. Interior minister Horst Seehofer cited reception capacity; Stephan Harbarth, for the CDU/CSU, warned that an open right would have a “Magnetwirkung” in Europe. On 15 June 2018 Akbulut, a sponsor of the Die Linke bill to restore an unrestricted right, said a quota nobody could time was unbearable for families already separated, and argued that the draft broke family life under the Basic Law and the European Convention on Human Rights. FDP member Benjamin Strasser interjected that the experts had said otherwise. The bill passed by 370 votes to 279, with three abstentions.

In the 20th electoral term she was a full member and Obfrau of the Committee on Family, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. On 12 November 2024 she led a Gruppe Die Linke motion for an immediate Gewalthilfegesetz, a bill on digital violence, a coordinating body under the Council of Europe Istanbul Convention, and a residence title for refugee women facing a husband’s violence that would not depend on him. It cited 256,276 registered domestic-violence cases in 2023, over 70 percent with female victims, and 7,786 shelter places against about 21,500 the sponsors said the convention required. With Nicole Gohlke she co-sponsored a February 2022 motion for more teachers and early-years staff and a February 2023 motion for a €100 billion fund for school and university buildings.

Foreign policy and the Kurdish question

Turkey, Syria and the PKK ban

In the 21st Bundestag the official biography, updated on 5 October 2026 from members' own disclosures, lists Akbulut as a full member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, a deputy on its crisis-prevention subcommittee, and deputy chair of the ASEAN parliamentary group. Her website calls her the Die Linke group's spokesperson for international politics. The group's roster does not: foreign policy is assigned to Cansu Özdemir and international relations to Lea Reisner, while its member profile still lists her as the group's lead on the development committee and only a substitute on foreign affairs.

Tagesschau wrote on 13 August 2023 that she had for years advocated for the Kurds and for the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), banned in Germany and classed as terrorist, and that she had sharply criticized Turkey's 2019 offensive in northern Syria against areas held by Kurdish militias of the Syrian Democratic Forces. Turkish prosecutors later called those posts "terror propaganda," the stated ground for her brief detention at Antalya airport that August.

Interior Minister Manfred Kanther banned the PKK and 35 related organizations on 26 November 1993 because the party used violence, broke criminal law and acted against international understanding. The ban remains in force. Tagesschau notes that Turkey, Europe and the United States treat the PKK as a terrorist organization, and that the conflict has killed at least 40,000 people. Council Decision (CFSP) 2025/1577 keeps the PKK on the European Union terrorist list, and the US State Department has listed it as a foreign terrorist organization since 8 October 1997.

Akbulut has pressed for the German ban to be lifted. For question time on 18 May 2022 she asked what changes would justify reassessing Kanther's ban after an application filed on 11 May 2022, and whether German-Turkish relations played a part. State secretary Mahmut Özdemir answered that the PKK, with about 14,500 followers, was the largest terrorist organization in Germany; that foregoing violence there did not offset logistics, finance and recruitment for armed struggle abroad; and that relations with Turkey did not bear on keeping the ban.

After the PKK announced its dissolution on 12 May 2025, following a call by its imprisoned founder Abdullah Öcalan, the government told her the step was welcome but not enough to revoke the terrorist classification, which it left to the courts. Akbulut replied that the ban was a political decision by a CDU interior minister, and that a peace process required lifting it rather than delegitimizing one party to the conflict. In the 26 February 2015 debate on an earlier Left motion to the same effect, CDU member Marian Wendt said the PKK used front organizations to pose as the Kurds' legitimate representative, that fighting the Islamic State was no legitimation, and that the ban was the right answer of a defensive democracy to a terrorist organization.

She has tied Turkish operations in Syria to German arms exports. In 2024, after strikes on the north, she told Neues Deutschland that deliberate attacks on civilian facilities, including a medical centre in Kobani, were war crimes, citing a Bundestag Research Services opinion on Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and said Germany had to stop exporting arms to Turkey. A February 2019 question she co-sponsored on political prisoners in Turkey named former Peoples' Democratic Party candidate Selahattin Demirtaş, former co-chair Figen Yüksekdağ and Kurdish mayors.

Development, disarmament and feminist foreign policy

On 14 May 2025, debating the CDU/CSU–SPD coalition agreement, Akbulut said development policy was being turned from poverty and inequality toward raw materials, militarization and keeping out refugees, and that tying aid to the readmission of deportees revived colonial patterns. She opposed dropping the pledge of at least 0.7 percent of gross national income for development cooperation, and cited 735 million people hungry worldwide and 22 percent of children under five chronically undernourished.

On 26 November 2025 she accused the government of naming Russian war crimes in Ukraine while staying silent on Gaza, Syria and NATO ally Turkey, where she said Friedrich Merz treated Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as a partner while the opposition was suppressed. She contrasted what she called record arms exports with a cut of more than half in humanitarian aid between 2024 and the 2026 budget, and asked for civilian settlement and international law instead of the Zeitenwende and bloc confrontation.

On feminist foreign policy, she told the Bundestag on 12 October 2022 that such a policy would mean supporting the protests that followed the death of Jina Mahsa Amini in Iran. She invoked the Kurdish women's-movement slogan "Jin, Jiyan, Azadi" ("Women, Life, Freedom") and asked for a United Nations inquiry, personal sanctions, and a stop to deportations to Iran.

Domestic intelligence and the 2023 detention in Turkey

Records of the domestic intelligence service

On 24 November 2017 Focus, in a report by Josef Hufelschulte citing Berlin security circles, wrote that Gökay Akbulut, newly elected to the Bundestag for Die Linke, had for years been observed by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and was registered in the Nachrichtendienstliches Informationssystem (NADIS). The stated ground was alleged contacts with Kurdish associations close to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), banned in Germany, with its sub-organizations, since 1993. Turkey, Europe and the United States treat the PKK as a terrorist organization, and it has been on the European Union terror list since 2002. As Focus described the entries, she was listed as Veranstaltungsverantwortliche for a Kurdish cultural festival in Mannheim in September 2012, and she declined to comment.

On 8 September, police told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur, nearly 40,000 people from across Europe were on the Maimarkt grounds; about 2,500 confronted some 600 officers, and about 80 officers were injured after bricks and bottles were thrown. Interior minister Reinhold Gall called it groundless violence set off by a teenager with the flag of a banned organization. Focus wrote of nearly 2,000 attackers using stones and fireworks, more than 80 injured officers and a point at which firearms were considered. Operations commander Dieter Schäfer told Focus she had never apologized to the injured officers, had called him a provocateur and did not stand on constitutional ground.

Die Linke's Baden-Württemberg executive said that day she had not organized the festival: she had interpreted for Selahattin Demirtaş, co-chair of the Peoples' Democratic Party, later imprisoned, and had mediated between the city and the organizers, tried to calm the clashes, regretted the violence and criticized the flag ban. It demanded that observation stop, and on 8 December 2017 called Schäfer's remark an insult and asked that data on her, including NADIS entries, be handed over and destroyed. In May 2018 the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung reported that her insult complaint against him was discontinued without further reasons. The Schwäbische Zeitung of 8 August 2021 quoted her saying she was "apparently not" still observed and had hired a lawyer; it dated the watching from 2012 and described her as active for Kurdish associations close to the PKK.

Detention at Antalya airport

On 3 August 2023 Akbulut was held for several hours at Antalya airport. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported it first, on 12 August; the Federal Foreign Office confirmed to the paper a high-level intervention by the federal government. Tagesschau, citing the ARD capital studio, said the warrant alleged "terror propaganda" over 2019 social-media posts criticizing Turkey's offensive in northern Syria against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. Her office said the posts were on her official account and thus identified her as a Bundestag member. She told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that she was visiting friends and family, learned of the warrant only after landing, had had no warning from Germany, and that the authorities cited her posts and her speeches on the PKK and the Kurds.

Her office told tagesschau she arrived between 16:00 and 17:00, was driven off by police, was released about 21:30 and left for Greece the next day; she told the newspaper she had landed at 15:30. Tagesschau and Der Spiegel, citing the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, reported that custody continued after she identified herself as a member of parliament; that the government pressed "at a high level, emphatically and through various channels" and obtained her release, with the Turkish justice minister reportedly involved; and that the embassy in Ankara and the consulate in Antalya stayed in close contact. On X she wrote that the file was deleted within hours, before any statement, thanked the Foreign Office, and said Turkey had no separation of powers.

In Bundestag paper 20/9457 of 22 November 2023, answering question 20/9084, the government confirmed the close contact and the high-level approaches, but would not discuss confidential talks or, citing her personality rights, the charges. It did not know conclusively whether the warrant had been lifted, had no official word on any investigation, and said it had not protested in public because it chooses the channel most likely to resolve a case. The question's preamble, which she co-signed, called her deputy chair of the German-Turkish parliamentary group and described a warrant of the Kayseri local court for "propaganda for a terrorist organization"; her post, quoted by Der Spiegel, had named the Kayseri prosecutor's office.

The 2025 train incident and criminal proceedings

Accounts of the confrontation

On Saturday evening, 25 January 2025, Gökay Akbulut, a Die Linke member of the Bundestag for Mannheim, was on a crowded Deutsche Bahn Intercity from Heidelberg to Stuttgart among supporters of VfB Stuttgart after an away match in Mainz. In an Instagram post the next evening she wrote that she had been insulted and attacked "by right-wing extremists." She said that, looking for a seat, she was sexually harassed and racially insulted; that men behind her chanted slogans for the Alternative for Germany; and that after she filmed them a man threw a beer bottle at her head. The post showed an injury above her left eye and a man raising his middle finger. A spokesperson told taz that she identified herself as a member of parliament only after the attack and called it apparently racially motivated; the federal police met her in Stuttgart, and Die Linke in Mannheim said she had filed a complaint.

Within days other passengers were reported as saying the aggression was hers. SWR, citing security circles, wrote that police doubted her account: she was said to have boarded intoxicated, drunk red wine, insulted supporters after pro-AfD chants and thrown the wine bottle without hitting anyone, after which a beer bottle was thrown back. taz, citing Stuttgarter Zeitung witnesses, reported that the supporters were described as "loud but peaceful," that none of those witnesses recalled AfD slogans, and that Akbulut had called the men "stupid" and "Drecksnazis" and thrown a small wine bottle before an object hit her above the left eye; some thought she was drunk. Asked about the contradictions, she told the German press agency that she had been attacked and injured, that nobody disputed that, and that the investigation should be awaited. Der Spiegel later reported that she was said to have used "Drecksfascho" and "Loser." In March 2025 Stuttgart prosecutors said she was suspected of attempted dangerous bodily harm for throwing a bottle toward a passenger, and that they had asked the Bundestag for leave to investigate insult as well.

Immunity, the penalty order and the appeal

SWR tied that removal of parliamentary immunity to the suspected bottle throw; the paper itself states no facts. On 23 April 2026 the Bundestag again, without debate and unanimously, authorized proceedings (printed paper 21/5510) on a ministry letter of 13 April 2026 under the same file number. The recommendation states no facts.

In early July 2026 the Stuttgart Amtsgericht confirmed to SWR a penal order (Strafbefehl) of 120 daily rates of 430 euros, 51,600 euros, including attempted dangerous bodily harm. Der Spiegel reported the same sum for attempted dangerous bodily harm and insult; the Mannheimer Morgen had the story first. Court spokesperson Matthias Buchen told the Stuttgarter Zeitung the charge was attempted dangerous bodily harm in legal unity with insult, in two such cases. The prosecution account he relayed, matching what the court told SWR, was that she had argued politically with several supporters, filmed them, insulted people of whom two complained, and thrown a wine bottle toward two of them, missing. That is the allegation in the order, not a finding after trial.

A penal order is issued in writing, without a hearing. Under section 410 of the Code of Criminal Procedure it equals a final judgment only to the extent that no timely objection is filed, and an objection may be limited to particular points. Buchen said she objected only to the income-based daily-rate amount, not to the order as a whole, so no public trial was expected and the statute provides a written decision. The finding and the number of rates therefore lay outside the objection she was reported to have made; the euro amount did not. Der Spiegel reported on 3 July that her office had not answered a request for comment. SWR reported on 6 July that the Mannheim office confirmed the limited objection and said the decision was not yet final.

The court told SWR that a penal order against a 41-year-old, issued in the spring, was already final: 100 daily rates of 40 euros for dangerous bodily harm in unity with insult. Prosecutors said he showed the middle finger and threw a beer can that injured her forehead; the Stuttgarter Zeitung reported that he accepted the order.