# Ines Schwerdtner

# Ines Schwerdtner

Ines Schwerdtner (born 26 August 1989 in Werdau, Saxony) is a German journalist and a politician of [Die Linke](/organizations/die-linke). On 19 October 2024 a federal party congress in Halle elected her co-chair alongside Jan van Aken. On 20 June 2026 a congress in Potsdam confirmed her in office, with [Luigi Pantisano](/people/luigi-pantisano) elected to succeed van Aken. Since the federal election of 23 February 2025 she has been a member of the Bundestag for Berlin-Lichtenberg (Wahlkreis 85).

She grew up in Werdau and in Hamburg, where the family moved when she was a child, and she studied political science and English in Berlin before a master’s degree in political theory in Frankfurt am Main. The biography she supplied to the Bundestag, which the parliament presents as the member’s own account, adds that she spent several years as a spokesperson for the Education and Science Union (GEW) and was overall coordinator of the Marxist journal *Das Argument*. That account dates her co-founding of the German edition of the socialist magazine *Jacobin*, and her editorship of it, to May 2020. The same month the *tageszeitung* interviewed her as the magazine’s editor-in-chief and quoted her description of the project as a readable and still radical political magazine. The Bundestag biography also lists the Berlin housing campaign Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen and names her as a co-founder of the alliance Genug ist Genug.

She joined Die Linke in the summer of 2023 and stood fifth on its list for the 2024 election to the [European Parliament](/organizations/european-parliament). The party took 2.7 percent of the vote, 1,091,586 ballots, and three seats, down from 5.5 percent in 2019, so a candidate in fifth place was not elected. At Halle she and van Aken replaced [Martin Schirdewan](/people/martin-schirdewan) and [Janine Wissler](/people/janine-wissler) after a run of defeats and the split around [Sahra Wagenknecht](/people/sahra-wagenknecht), when the party was polling at about 3 to 4 percent and setting re-entry to the Bundestag in 2025 as its goal. Schwerdtner, with no woman standing against her, received 79.8 percent; van Aken received 88 percent of 542 votes.

On 23 February 2025 Die Linke won 8.8 percent of the national second votes, 4,356,532 ballots, a gain of 3.9 percentage points on 2021, and 64 seats, 25 more than before, six of them direct mandates. The Federal Electoral Committee adopted that result as final on 14 March 2025. In Lichtenberg, Schwerdtner won the constituency with 34.0 percent of the first votes (52,378), ahead of [Beatrix von Storch](/people/beatrix-von-storch) of [the Alternative](/organizations/the-alternative) for Germany on 21.9 percent (33,707); turnout was 79.0 percent. In the Bundestag she is a full member of the Budget Committee and a deputy member of the Finance Committee. The Potsdam congress re-elected her with 85.7 percent, while Pantisano, succeeding van Aken after van Aken declined to run again on health grounds, received 53.3 percent. In September 2025 *Welt* reported that an Instagram video from the Belgian festival Manifiesta showed her in a scarf mapping Israel and the Palestinian territories with city names only in Arabic, that criticism inside the party was sharp, and that she said the scarf had been handed to her at the festival and that she had taken it off once she recognized the motif.

## Early life and education

### Childhood in Saxony and Hamburg

Ines Schwerdtner was born on 26 August 1989 in Werdau, Saxony, near Chemnitz, then still called [Karl-Marx](/people/karl-marx)-Stadt. Her father had worked in the GDR as a ship's cook and then in a heating plant, and her mother in a Werdau spinning mill; both lost their jobs after German reunification, and the family later moved west. *Das Parlament* put her age at the move at three and a half; *Der Freitag* said four. An uncle found a flat in Hamburg and a post for her father as a basic-grade court official (*einfacher Beamter*); her mother later worked in care for older people. She has called herself a *Wendekind* and written that Hamburg and Saxony were both home.

In Hamburg-Harburg they lived in a 1950s block she compared with an East German *Plattenbau*; she later said the Werdau flat had been "a thousand times nicer", and that Hamburg's grand-bourgeois side stayed foreign. She dropped a Saxon accent out of shame, while her parents kept theirs, and holidays usually meant a Werdau allotment or, in summer, Saxon Switzerland. In June 2025 she told *Der Freitag* that she had a large family which had "broken apart": her mother had seven siblings and her father three, many uncles were craftsmen or building workers, and her father—dead about ten years—and about half her aunts and uncles died before retirement age, which she linked to hard work, unemployment and marriages that failed after the *Wende*.

Politics mattered little at home, where there were few books. From the 1998 election, when she was nine, she followed talk shows with Anne Will and Bundestag debates, and from 2000 she kept *Bild* cuttings on Ronald Schill's right-wing populist party. At a comprehensive school (*Gesamtschule*) in Harburg—*Das Parlament* called it social-democratic; she remembered it as shaped by migration, with mostly Turkish, Kurdish and Russian friends—she became student spokesperson and campaigned for reforms, treating education as a question of equal chances. In an Antifa group she took part in staged readings of Gestapo protocols and in demonstrations in Lower Saxony against the [National Democratic Party](/organizations/national-democratic-party), and in a 2007 Hamburg referendum on longer joint schooling she collected signatures with Sabine Boeddinghaus, later leader of the Left group in the Hamburg parliament.

At 17 she won a study trip to Catalonia, the main prize of a competition under the motto "Zivilcourage vereint" run by [Gesine Lötzsch](/people/gesine-lotzsch), following the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. It was her first journey abroad and, she has said, her first contact with the party, around the merger of the WASG and the PDS; she later interned in Lötzsch's office. In October 2024 she confirmed that a history teacher had written in her *Abitur* newspaper that she would chair "the new SED", adding that he had also imagined her succeeding Anne Will.

### University and the education union

After the *Abitur* she moved to Berlin to study political science and English. Her Bundestag biography, which the parliament says rests on members' own statements, records that she joined the Education and Science Union (Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft, GEW) and was a spokesperson for several years; neither that text nor her website names the Berlin university or a completed degree.

In 2014 she moved to Frankfurt am Main for a master's in political theory. She later said that critical theory was then the field to be in, that she attended Axel Honneth's colloquium and thought her Marxism tried his patience, and that the small local left otherwise left little mark. In the same years she was overall coordinator of the Marxist journal *Das Argument*; its archive was moved from Berlin into her flat and taken back about three years later. She described the sociologist Frigga Haug and the philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug as teachers in different ways, and said she then went her own way.

## Journalism and publishing

### Das Argument and freelance journalism

During a master's degree in political theory in Frankfurt am Main, which her Bundestag biography—drawn from her own account—dates to 2014, Schwerdtner was overall coordinator of the Marxist journal *Das Argument*. The review for philosophy and social sciences is associated with the sociologist Frigga Haug and the philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug; it began in 1959 in anti-nuclear campaigning at the Free University of Berlin, after Haug took over a leaflet series that Ulrike Meinhof was leaving. In June 2025 she told *der Freitag* that the Berlin archive was moved to her Frankfurt flat for her studies and later brought back, which she called the largest move of her life. She described the Haugs as teachers, said a circle around the journal produced a book she helped write, and recalled choosing Frankfurt because critical theory was then fashionable, including a colloquium with Axel Honneth.

In November 2018 *der Freitag* still listed her as coordinator, living in Frankfurt, and as an editor of the left online magazine *Ada*. The interview turned on a newly published book on a "new class politics" to which she had contributed: she argued for "more socialism" and economic democracy rather than small gains on wages, pensions and housing, and pointed to [Jeremy Corbyn](/people/jeremy-corbyn)'s proposal to renationalize key industries as evidence that the Social Democratic Party had abandoned that kind of policy. On 20 March 2018 *analyse & kritik* ran her essay "Mehr als nur angehängt," which held that such a politics needed a Marxist-feminist account of changing wage labour, including unpaid care, rather than feminism added afterwards. For *der Freitag* she also wrote on the state and prices, in April 2021 calling for a "provident state" against what she termed the neoliberal erosion of public services, and in August 2022 attacking the gas levy as a device that protected corporate profits while impoverishing households. *taz*, and her *analyse & kritik* author note from those years, identified her as a co-host of the left politics podcast halbzehn.fm.

### The German edition of Jacobin

*Ada* was the direct forerunner of the German *Jacobin*. In August 2018 the Swiss weekly *WOZ* described it as a new online offshoot that mainly translated the [New York](/organizations/new-york) magazine, with Loren Balhorn and co-editor-in-chief Sarah Nagel leading the editorial team. In May 2020 *WOZ* wrote that Schwerdtner and Ole Rauch had started *Ada* about two years earlier as a trial, and that it failed after the Handelsblatt Media Group launched a business title under the same name. *nd* tied the U.S. title's audience to the revival of socialist ideas around [Bernie Sanders](/people/bernie-sanders)'s 2016 campaign.

By December 2019 *nd* already presented her as editor-in-chief of an edition for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, issued by Brumaire Verlag. She said class politics and recognition politics had to be pursued together, and that in Germany the word "socialism" carried the burden of the GDR dictatorship. Her Bundestag biography dates the co-founding to May 2020. The first print issue appeared at the beginning of May under the heading "Jenseits der Sozialdemokratie," with comic-style cover portraits including [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez](/people/alexandria-ocasio-cortez) and [Kevin Kühnert](/people/kevin-kuhnert), interviews with Kühnert and the economist Grace Blakeley, and an essay by Oliver Nachtwey on the SPD. *WOZ* named Rauch as publisher. Schwerdtner told the paper that New York set no political line, and that German left publishing already served existing milieux but did not try to enlarge the left; a few weeks after the launch, Rauch spoke of subscriptions in the four figures.

On 1 May 2020 she told *taz* the aim was a "stylish, readable and still radical" magazine, addressed beyond people already on the left and ready to use pop culture and plain language. She defined democratic socialism as a society in which people could co-determine the economy, urban planning and culture. *Die Zeit*, in "Das regelt der Marx" on 14 May 2020, quoted the new magazine as making "no secret" of wanting democratic socialism. From November 2022 she and Nils Schniederjann hosted the German edition's podcast *Hyperpolitik*, named for an essay by Anton Jäger that *taz* summarized as identity and lifestyle disputes displacing conflicts over class and distribution; the paper reviewed the early episodes that December. She remained editor-in-chief until July 2023. On 12 November 2023, reporting on her as a recent member of Die Linke seeking a European-election list place, *taz* dated the end of the editorship to that July.

## Housing and cost-of-living campaigns

### Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen

The tenant campaign Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen asked Berlin to socialise the housing of large private landlords. On 26 September 2021 voters decided a resolution, not a finished statute, calling on the Senate to draft a law transferring, under Article 15 of the Basic Law, the stocks of profit-seeking companies above a proposed threshold of 3,000 apartments into common ownership, with compensation “well below market value.” The state returning officer’s final count was 1,035,950 yes votes (57.6 percent of participants) to 715,698 no (39.8 percent). Of 2,447,600 eligible voters, 1,798,308 took part (73.5 percent). Yes votes also cleared the quorum of 25 percent of the electorate (611,900), so the resolution was adopted. Legal Tribune Online reported that the vote did not legally bind the Senate, because no bill had been on the ballot. It put the stocks at about 240,000 apartments, roughly 15 percent of Berlin’s rental housing, and contrasted a Senate estimate of €29–36 billion with the initiative’s €7.3–13.7 billion, to be paid in bonds redeemed from rents. The SPD, the CDU, the AfD and the FDP opposed expropriation; Die Linke wanted a statute without conditions, and [the Greens](/organizations/the-greens) called socialization a last resort.

Schwerdtner did not found the campaign. In March 2022 Neues Deutschland described her as one of its spokespersons. At a retreat of the Berlin Left she said the party would have “no authenticity, no legitimacy” if it failed to carry out the vote, and she rejected a quarter-share for the initiative on a planned expert commission in favor of about 60 percent. Her Bundestag biography records the campaign.

The Senate under governing mayor [Franziska Giffey](/people/franziska-giffey) did not table a socialization statute. On 29 March 2022 it appointed a 13-member commission, chaired by former justice minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin and including the initiative, to test constitutionality. The report, delivered on 28 June 2023, was later summarized by the Senate as a majority finding that socialization was legally and constitutionally possible. [Kai Wegner](/people/kai-wegner), CDU governing mayor after the 2023 repeat election, said at the handover that he remained skeptical. The CDU–SPD agreement offered a framework law for public services, not an immediate transfer, and delayed its entry into force by two years so the Federal [Constitutional Court](/organizations/constitutional-court) could review it. By summer 2024 the Berliner Mieterverein reported that Wegner had ruled out expropriations in his term and that another external opinion was not expected before the third quarter of 2024. Director Ulrike Hamann-Onnertz called this a deliberate delay; initiative speaker Justus Henze accused him of ignoring the vote; and the Left’s Carsten Schatz called the blockade a scandal. The initiative began drafting its own bill for a further referendum. The apartments named in the 2021 resolution had not been transferred.

### Genug ist Genug

In September 2022 the Federal Statistical Office reported consumer prices 7.9 percent above 2021, a monthly peak of 10.4 percent in October, and crisis- and war-related effects that made energy and food especially expensive. That month the Berliner Zeitung identified Schwerdtner, then editor-in-chief of the German edition of Jacobin, as one of the initiators of “Genug ist Genug,” modeled on Britain’s Enough is Enough. She criticized the end of the 9-Euro-Ticket and the fuel discount, and the planned gas levy, argued for an excess-profits tax and an energy-price cap, and said the campaign would first articulate discontent and support wage rounds rather than immediately call its own demonstrations.

At an overcrowded kickoff in Berlin-Neukölln on 13 October 2022 she listed six demands: a €1,000 winter payment, a permanent 9-Euro-Ticket, caps on gas and electricity, socialization of energy, a tax on crisis profits, and substantial pay rises. Care, cleansing and postal workers tied the protest to bargaining and set it apart from the right. The wider left “hot autumn” stayed small. In late December the taz called it a failure: the related Umverteilen alliance peaked at about 7,000 people, and most other demonstrations were smaller. Schwerdtner said that, “albeit heavily watered down,” half the list had been met by federal relief—an energy package of about €200 billion, price brakes, the 49-Euro-Ticket and an EU excess-profits tax—while poverty and cold homes continued. The same account said arguments over sanctions tied to [Russia’s invasion of Ukraine](/facts/2022-russian-invasion-of-ukraine) had split the left, and that far-right Monday protests had also stopped growing. Her Bundestag biography calls her a co-founder of the alliance.

## Entry into Die Linke

### Membership and the 2024 European election

Schwerdtner joined Die Linke on 25 August 2023. In an interview that day, the former editor of the German edition of *Jacobin* said she was seeking a place on the list for the [2024 European Parliament election](/facts/2024-european-parliament-election-in-germany) because social movements kept stopping short without a strong socialist party, and because she considered the party to be in an existential crisis. She had not fixed a ranking. She wanted the campaign to link local work to European decisions on tax and redistribution, and to reach people in the east who felt they had lost a political home.

On 23 October 2023 Sahra Wagenknecht and nine other Bundestag members left the party and presented the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, intended as the basis of a party that would contest the European election. Ten of 38 deputies resigned from the party while planning to stay in the Fraktion through what Wagenknecht called an orderly transition. Group chair [Dietmar Bartsch](/people/dietmar-bartsch) called the step irresponsible and unacceptable; the departures left the group short of the size required for Fraktionsstatus. In Halle the next month Schwerdtner told MDR she would not switch projects or rely on one person who changed positions.

The federal list was elected at a representatives’ assembly in Augsburg on the weekend of 17–19 November 2023. Martin Schirdewan, party co-chair and a member of the European Parliament, led it with 86.9 percent. Carola Rackete, the sea-rescue activist, was second with 77.78 percent; sitting MEP Özlem Demirel took third with 62.04 percent over Didem Aydurmuş; and the physician Gerhard Trabert was fourth with 96.81 percent. Rackete and Trabert were not party members. For fifth place Schwerdtner, nominated by the Saxony-Anhalt association, beat Daphne Weber of Lower Saxony in a runoff, 57.41 percent to 40.23, after Frederike Gronde-Brunner of Berlin and Petra Hennig of the Saarland were eliminated. She lived in Berlin and had grown up in Saxony. Only Saxony-Anhalt and Bavaria backed her; Saxony’s Linke supported Rackete.

On 9 June 2024 Die Linke won 1,091,586 votes, 2.7 percent, down from 2,056,049 votes and 5.5 percent in 2019. The Federal Returning Officer reported that the Federal Electoral Committee confirmed the result on 3 July 2024: three of Germany’s 96 seats, two fewer than in 2019. They went to the first three list places—Martin Simon Schirdewan, Carola Rackete and Özlem Alev Demirel-Böhlke—so Trabert and Schwerdtner were not elected. The BSW, on its first nationwide ballot, took 2,456,460 votes, 6.2 percent and six seats. In Saxony-Anhalt Die Linke fell from 14.4 percent in 2019 to 4.8 percent.

### The eastern tour

Before the list vote Schwerdtner said she would drive through the east so that people in small towns would still see a left alternative. MDR followed her in Halle in November 2023, where she addressed striking public-sector workers, collected signatures with state chair [Janina Böttger](/people/janina-bottger) for a municipal rent petition, and left the same afternoon for Brandenburg. She said a joint European campaign would include their municipal work.

*Die Zeit* reported in June 2024 that since the previous summer she had been visiting party units and threatened plants, including Meyer Burger in Bitterfeld-Wolfen and Freiberg, and speaking with works councils. In Finsterwalde, in southern Brandenburg, she campaigned on the market square with local officials, including state chair Sebastian Walter. The report set those stops against the party’s loss of eastern voters to the BSW and the Alternative for Germany.

On 26 August 2024 she told *nd* that the campaign had taken her into many Kreisverbände, where anger at the party’s condition mixed with hope of a [new start](/facts/new-start). She said she would stay for the eastern state elections and then visit as many district branches as she could, including in the west.

## Party leadership

### The Halle congress of 2024

On 19 October 2024, delegates at the federal congress of Die Linke in Halle (Saale) elected Ines Schwerdtner and Jan van Aken co-chairs. They succeeded Janine Wissler and Martin Schirdewan, who did not stand again. The party was described as being in an existential crisis after the breakaway around former parliamentary leader Sahra Wagenknecht and her Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, and after a run of defeats that included 2.7 percent in the June 2024 European election, down from 5.5 percent in 2019. National polls stood at three to four percent, including in eastern Germany, long a stronghold of Die Linke and its predecessor, the [Party of Democratic Socialism](/organizations/party-of-democratic-socialism). The new leadership’s stated aim was a return to the Bundestag in 2025.

Schwerdtner, a journalist who had joined only in the summer of 2023, had no opponent for the place reserved for a woman in the dual leadership and received 79.8 percent. Van Aken won 477 of 542 valid votes, or 88.0 percent; a little-known challenger, Emanuel Schaaf, received 19. Van Aken said he wanted to give the majority a voice, take on the “indecently rich,” and stop telling people how badly they were doing. Schwerdtner said, “We are the opposite of fear, we are hope,” and called for clarity, focus, credibility and a voice for the east.

### From polling collapse to the 2025 result

Months after Halle, few inside or outside the party expected it to clear the five-percent threshold. The campaign for the early federal election narrowed the message to high rents and prices and largely set aside earlier internal disputes. Lead candidate Heidi Reichinnek dominated the campaign on social media. The party was strongest among first-time voters and, among younger women in cities, reached 35 percent. Van Aken was, with Reichinnek, one of its most visible faces.

A plan for [Gregor Gysi](/people/gregor-gysi), [Bodo Ramelow](/people/bodo-ramelow) and Dietmar Bartsch to secure re-entry with three constituency wins was treated at the time as a last resort. Gysi and Ramelow won their districts; further seats in Berlin, for the first time including former West Berlin, and one in Leipzig brought the direct-mandate total to six. Tagesschau credited a wider swing and called [Friedrich Merz](/people/friedrich-merz) the party’s most effective unwitting helper, after the Union parties voted with the Alternative for Germany on migration just before the election.

The election was held on 23 February 2025. On 14 March, Federal Returning Officer Ruth Brand announced the final result, which left the provisional seat totals unchanged. Die Linke received 4,356,532 second votes, 8.8 percent of valid second votes, 3.9 points above its 4.9 percent in 2021, and 64 of the 630 seats, 25 more than in 2021, six of them constituencies. Turnout was 82.5 percent. Tagesschau called the party the surprise winner of an election that, months earlier, its own members had doubted it would survive as a parliamentary force.

### The 2026 Potsdam congress

On 15 April 2026 van Aken told the executive that he would not run again in June. He said he had to leave office for health reasons, that the illness was not life-threatening, and that the decision was hard because he had planned to stand again with Schwerdtner; his re-election had been regarded as assured. He kept his Bundestag mandate for the rest of the term. Schwerdtner, who sought another term, said they had together brought about the comeback and called the previous year and a half a “fever dream.” Membership had more than doubled, to more than 120,000.

About 500 delegates met in Potsdam. On the opening day they adopted, by a large majority, a compromise resolution describing Israel’s conduct in the [Gaza war](/facts/gaza-war) as genocide; a sharper counter-motion failed.

On 20 June delegates confirmed Schwerdtner with 85.7 percent, about 10 percent voting against her, up from 79.8 percent in Halle. Pantisano, 46, a Bundestag member from Baden-Württemberg and deputy chair of the parliamentary group, succeeded van Aken without an opponent but with only 53.3 percent; 30.3 percent voted no. He said he wanted to win the working class back and would spend the coming week earning the trust of members who had withheld it.

The margin was widely read as a rebuke for an interview with *Bild* in which he said there was “ultimately no difference at all right now” between the [Christian Democratic Union](/organizations/christian-democratic-union-of-germany), “which pursues fascist politics,” the AfD, “or the fascists themselves.” CDU general secretary [Carsten Linnemann](/people/carsten-linnemann) said that equating [Christian Democrats](/organizations/christian-democrats) with fascists disqualified a person from political responsibility. Inside Die Linke the sharpest criticism came from eastern branches: one delegate noted that Pantisano had also argued for working with the CDU in Saxony-Anhalt to keep the AfD out of office. At the congress he called the sentence pointed and taken out of context, while still saying the CDU was “already partly” making fascist policy; he later told the German press agency the wording was “abbreviated” and that his point was that the CDU was adopting AfD policies and thereby strengthening that party. Another explanation circulating at the congress was that his candidacy had been announced from above. Schwerdtner said Halle had given the leadership an advance of trust and that the party would oppose cuts planned by the CDU–SPD government.

## Bundestag mandate

### The 2025 contest in Berlin-Lichtenberg

Constituency 85, Berlin-Lichtenberg, covers the borough of Lichtenberg: 52.1 square kilometres with 294,700 inhabitants on 31 December 2023, of whom 21.6 percent were foreign nationals. The same borough had been constituency 86 at the 2021 federal election. Gesine Lötzsch of Die Linke had won it as a direct mandate six times from 2002, including with 47.5 percent in 2009 and 25.8 percent in 2021; she announced that she would not stand in 2025, a decision she said she had already taken in 2021, and criticized the party leadership over its European-election strategy. In November 2024 the Lichtenberg organization nominated Ines Schwerdtner, by then party co-chair, with 95.6 percent of the votes. The Federal Returning Officer's roll of those elected also records that she stood second on Die Linke's Berlin state list.

The election was held on 23 February 2025. Of 196,799 eligible voters, 155,397 cast ballots, a turnout of 79.0 percent, 7.2 points higher than in 2021. There were 154,160 valid first votes and 154,333 valid second votes. Schwerdtner took the constituency with 52,378 first votes (34.0 percent), 18,671 ahead of Beatrix von Storch of the Alternative for Germany (AfD). The Federal Returning Officer recorded her as elected in the constituency, and the Bundestag lists a constituency mandate for Wahlkreis 085; the 21st Bundestag constituted itself on 25 March 2025.

The final result for the larger parties, with changes in percentage points against 2021, was:

| Party and constituency candidate | First votes | Share | Change | Second votes | Share | Change |
| --- | ---: | ---: | ---: | ---: | ---: | ---: |
| Die Linke — Ines Schwerdtner | 52,378 | 34.0% | .2 | 36,204 | 23.5% | .2 |
| AfD — Beatrix von Storch | 33,707 | 21.9% | .5 | 34,635 | 22.4% | .8 |
| CDU — Danny Freymark | 27,190 | 17.6% | .1 | 21,230 | 13.8% | .8 |
| SPD — Jan Zimmerling | 13,926 | 9.0% | .4 | 18,331 | 11.9% | .1 |
| BSW — Norman Wolf | 11,527 | 7.5% | — | 15,613 | 10.1% | — |
| Alliance 90/The Greens — Elisabeth Giesemann | 8,108 | 5.3% | .3 | 16,699 | 10.8% | .6 |
| Tierschutzpartei | 3,576 | 2.3% | .8 | 3,100 | 2.0% | .4 |
| FDP — Sören Henschel | 2,231 | 1.4% | .6 | 3,877 | 2.5% | .4 |

Schwerdtner's first-vote share ran 10.5 points ahead of her party's second-vote share. On the list vote Die Linke finished only 1,569 votes, and 1.1 points, ahead of the AfD; the SPD and the Greens fell sharply, and the new BSW passed 10 percent of second votes. The 2021 comparison published by the Federal Returning Officer uses the result as finalized after the partial rerun in parts of Berlin on 11 February 2024, when Die Linke still held the seat with 36,409 first votes (25.8 percent) on a turnout of 71.7 percent.

### Committees and faction roles

The Bundestag biography lists Schwerdtner as an ordinary member of the Budget Committee (Haushaltsausschuss) and a deputy member of the Finance Committee. The Budget Committee constituted itself on 21 May 2025 with 42 members; Die Linke's four ordinary members were Dietmar Bartsch, [Tamara Mazzi](/people/tamara-mazzi), Schwerdtner and Sascha Wagner. On the Left group's own profile she is, within its working group I, spokesperson for budget policy on the debt brake and special funds (Sondervermögen). That designation is the group's, not an office recorded on the Bundestag biography.

Her first speech in the plenary, on 15 May 2025, during the debate on finance and the budget, argued that the debt brake had left bridges, schools, hospitals and municipalities short of money, and described special funds and off-budget accounts as accounting devices rather than a substitute for changing the rule. She said municipalities held more than €31 billion in debt while the federal government would relieve only about €250 million of it, and she asked to be invited onto a commission to reform the debt brake. Vice-president [Andrea Lindholz](/people/andrea-lindholz), noting that it was a maiden speech, afterwards told the House that members should not accuse one another of talking nonsense and should not call the AfD fascists, as Schwerdtner had done in the speech. On 28 November 2025 the Bundestag adopted the 2026 federal budget law, with expenditure of €524.54 billion, by 322 votes to 252; Schwerdtner voted no.

## Political positions

### Economic and social policy

In an October 2025 interview with *Surplus*, Schwerdtner traced the budget gaps under Chancellor Friedrich Merz to tax cuts for the wealthiest, the constitutional debt brake and rearmament. Social cuts were "no law of nature", she said, but a means of disciplining the working class; about €1.5 billion from Bürgergeld would not close the hole. "Nobody needs a NATO quota of 5 percent." Die Linke wanted the brake abolished for investment and, if need be, social spending, though she called a reform the realistic outcome. Revenue, she said, still had to change: bring back the wealth tax, make the inheritance tax fairer, and put members of parliament and civil servants into the statutory pension. "Only when the debt brake falls can capitalism fall."

The yield she quotes is a party calculation. In the July 2026 ARD summer interview she said a wealth tax could raise €147 billion a year. Tagesschau traced the figure to a study Die Linke commissioned from the German Institute for Economic Research: 1 percent above allowances of €1 million in personal wealth and €5 million in business assets, then 5 percent above €50 million and 12 percent above €1 billion. Co-author Stefan Bach said avoidance and relocation made that yield unlikely. In the Bundestag on 9 July 2025 she had said "up to €120 billion a year", "27 times" the Bürgergeld cuts then planned.

That speech set "hundreds of billions" for tanks against €4 billion for social housing, and said the budget served property cartels and the boards of BlackRock, Nestlé and Rheinmetall. "Real security is social security," beginning with "a roof over one's head": a rent cap, no VAT on staple food, municipal investment and debt-brake reform. She said [Lars Klingbeil](/people/lars-klingbeil) would not defend the minimum wage; a 2024 paper with Martin Schirdewan had sought €15. On n-tv in November 2025 she urged socialising landlords above 3,000 flats, naming Vonovia: "They are ripping us off." In July 2026 she spoke of a "rent mafia"; Tagesschau noted that overcharging is already an offence and that Berlin's 2020 rent cap fell because federal law occupies the field.

### Foreign policy and the Middle East

On Ukraine she has refused German arms deliveries while calling [Vladimir Putin](/people/vladimir-putin) an enemy. In the ZDF summer interview of 24 August 2025 she said there was "no dissent at all that Putin is a fascist or also a dictator", but that this did not mean delivering weapons. Peace was possible "only with negotiations"; many tens of thousands of deaths "would not have been necessary" had diplomacy come earlier. She proposed [United Nations](/organizations/united-nations) peacekeepers rather than NATO or Bundeswehr troops; ZDF noted that Russia can veto any such mandate. Die Linke, she said, should be the party that "consistently" argues for a European "peace power".

On Israel and Gaza she has condemned the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, kept a two-state formula, and later called the war a genocide in her own voice. On 27 September 2025 she told the *Frankfurter Rundschau* that since the Halle congress in late 2024 the consensus was that neither those attacks nor the war on the Palestinian population legitimised the other. The evidence was "by now overwhelming", she said, once organisations, Israeli experts and an independent commission of the UN Human Rights Council spoke of genocide and of German complicity. The demands she called the party's "from the beginning" were a full arms embargo, recognition of Palestine and two states.

Three days earlier, in *der Freitag*, she still said "the courts will decide" the legal label. Hamas was "a terrorist, fascist organisation" and a red line. "We are still fighting politically for the two-state solution," the only way she saw for both peoples to live together; recognition of Palestine was required to keep it possible, and [Benjamin Netanyahu](/people/benjamin-netanyahu)'s settlements and seizure of Gaza were what threatened it. She wanted the EU–Israel association agreement suspended and sanctions on [Itamar Ben-Gvir](/people/itamar-ben-gvir) and [Bezalel Smotrich](/people/bezalel-smotrich), and called a boycott of Jewish traders antisemitic.

At the Potsdam congress on 19 June 2026 she said she had left the adopted line only once: "I decided to call it a genocide." Delegates then voted to "join this assessment" of a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, while affirming Israel's existence as a "refuge for Jews" and "the right to exist of Palestine"—the resolution's words, not hers. On 7 October 2026 she told the Bundestag the massacre was "a war crime and a crime against humanity, and nothing justifies it", and that "what is happening in Gaza is a genocide. Both are true, and they belong together." A secure Israel, she said, required a secure Palestine. On 14 October she told ZDF there was "a right to exist for Israel and also for Palestine".

## Reception and controversies

### Assessments of her leadership

Accounts of Schwerdtner's first year beside Jan van Aken turned on whether Die Linke could recover before the February 2025 Bundestag election. The federal returning officer recorded 8.8 percent of second votes, up from 4.9 percent in 2021. Writing on election night, Pascal Beucker of *taz* called the result a "comeback miracle" after polls of 3 to 4 percent into late January. He credited the October 2024 Halle leadership's focus on rents and prices, and Heidi Reichinnek's speeches after the CDU/CSU joined the FDP, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance and the AfD on migration. In October 2025 David Grzeschik, in the *Saarbrücker Zeitung*, called them an "Erfolgsduo," stronger than under Janine Wissler and Martin Schirdewan and, on his account, stably in double digits, while noting that she had joined only in 2023 and van Aken had already served two terms.

In May 2025 Linda Tutmann wrote in *[Der Spiegel](/organizations/der-spiegel)* that "others in the party harvest the fame," which Schwerdtner wanted to change with plain language and an "ABC of Marxism." The sharper fight was a pay cap. *[Die Welt](/organizations/die-welt)* reported a letter in which Bodo Ramelow accused her and van Aken of "political deception" and a breach of trust, and Tagesschau reported that 23 of 64 Bundestag members asked to cancel the debate before the Potsdam congress.

In June 2026 Bayerischer Rundfunk reported that youth officials had praised Stalin, Mao and the GDR and posted "Israel verrecke." Schwerdtner and van Aken said the party had "clearly broken with Stalinism" and would examine consequences; she told *taz* it was "good" the youth group had distanced itself. Reichinnek told the *Rheinische Post* the party must act if it did not. BR reported that eastern associations, including Saxony-Anhalt, drafted motions the executive did not put to a vote. On ARD she said red lines were needed but that she wanted to "work together"; afterward BR called the relationship unresolved, while youth speakers complained of an "authoritarian wave."

### Debate over Israel and antisemitism

On 16 September 2025 *Die Welt* reported a since-deleted Instagram video from the Manifiesta festival in Ostend in which Schwerdtner wore a keffiyeh whose map of Israel and the Palestinian territories gave cities only Arabic names. The paper noted a May 2025 executive resolution against images that negated Israel's existence "under the cloak of solidarity" with Palestinians. She told *Welt* the scarf was given to her "in a lively situation" and that she removed it once she recognized the motif, adding that the party opposed antisemitism, stood for Israel's existence, a two-state solution and peace in Gaza. Stephan Grigat, who directs an antisemitism-studies center in North Rhine-Westphalia, called the design "a call to abolish Israel" and criticized her platform with Jeremy Corbyn and [Peter Mertens](/people/peter-mertens). The founding circle of BAG Shalom told *Welt* the map of "a Palestine without Israel" was "clearly antisemitic," and that the party was promoting Israel-related antisemitism "from the very top."

In March 2026 a Lower Saxony congress, by 104 of 157 delegates, rejected "today's actually existing Zionism" and referred to apartheid and genocide; a video called the branch the first "anti-Zionist" state association. Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told the *Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung* the party offered Jew-hatred "a home"; state commissioner Gerhard Wegner called the text "vile antisemitism." On ZDF's *Markus Lanz* on 18 March, Lanz called the video "quite blatant, hard antisemitism." Schwerdtner called it "very, very borderline" and the resolution "not right," then said, "No, I do not find it antisemitic," because that would trivialize antisemitism aimed at "the destruction of Jewish life in Germany." The *Jüdische Allgemeine* called the appearance "anti-Zionism acrobatics." Asked about Gregor Gysi, who had tied such currents to people with a migration background, she said he held all migrants "liable." The paper also reported Andreas Büttner's resignation, Ramelow's *Spiegel* warning against a "community of faith," and Jan Korte's phrase "massive antisemitism problem."

At the June 2026 Potsdam congress she said, to applause, that she had "decided to call it a genocide," and asked whom it helped to "pick ourselves apart over individual words" when that would not feed a child in Gaza. *Welt* reported that delegates then labeled the war "Völkermord" while restating both states' existence and the disarmament of Hamas.

The dispute returned in Berlin's 2026 coalition talks. On n-tv on 19 October she defended deputy Vanessa Emde's claim that states, unlike people, have no right of existence, calling it "absolutely legitimate" in law while saying she disagreed and that the party stood for both Israel and Palestine. After the SPD and the Greens paused soundings, she told ZDF the talks had been "on quite a good path." Schuster told *Der Tagesspiegel* that pressing on was "a genuine declaration of bankruptcy" against Jew-hatred, citing the lack of consequences for Emde and Ferat Koçak. In Hagen on 17 October she said naming "the genocide in Gaza" was not antisemitism and that it was "disgusting" to "instrumentalize" it in a "smear campaign." She called it "complete madness" when Chancellor Friedrich Merz said a Linke-led Berlin government was "not permissible" for democracy.

## Personal life

Ines Schwerdtner was born on 26 August 1989 in Werdau, Saxony. Her Bundestag biography, which the parliament says rests on her own statements, lists her as without religious affiliation, unmarried, and the mother of one child, a son born in 2015.

In June 2025 she told *Der Freitag* that German reunification broke up a large family. Her father, a ship's cook in East Germany and later a heating-plant worker, and her mother, employed in a spinning mill in Werdau near Chemnitz (then Karl-Marx-Stadt), both lost their jobs; when she was four they moved to Hamburg-Harburg, where an uncle had found a flat and a lower-grade civil-service post for her father at a local court. Her mother had seven siblings and her father three. She said her father, who died about ten years before the interview, and about half of her aunts and uncles died before retirement age, and that she could not say shipboard or plant work had caused his death, speaking instead of unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, and broken marriages among former East Germans. The interview dates her return to Berlin to 2020. In October 2024 *taz* described her as a 35-year-old Berlin publicist.

The Bundestag record still lists her as unmarried. On 26 February 2025 the *Kleine Zeitung* reported that she and Robert Krotzer, a Graz city councillor of the [Communist Party of Austria](/organizations/communist-party-of-austria), had been a couple since autumn 2023. Krotzer told the paper, "Yes, we have been in a long-distance relationship since 2023," and said that when they meet, politics does not take up all of their time. *Der Freitag* also dated the relationship to 2023; asked whether the KPÖ was a model, she cited its local advice work and its caps on officeholders' pay.

On becoming co-chair of Die Linke with Jan van Aken in October 2024, the two said that of the €8,162.50 gross a month due under the party's ver.di house agreement, each would keep €2,850 net, about the average German net wage, and give the rest to a social fund. Van Aken said that detached salaries lead to detached politics; Schwerdtner said she would hold advice hours at party headquarters. Krotzer later put her ceiling at €2,800. *Tagesschau* and *Neues Deutschland* reported that from their entry into the Bundestag in February 2025 both kept that €2,850 net limit on the parliamentary allowance. Her own schedule states that the full allowance of €11,833.47 gross is paid and taxed, and that after tax, health insurance, party levies, a group donation, dues, and a payment to a Lichtenberg social fund, €2,850 remains. She lists membership of the [Rosa Luxemburg Foundation](/organizations/rosa-luxemburg-foundation), the Education and Science Union (GEW), and the Institute for Critical Theory, and says a separate tax-free €5,467.27 covers constituency offices in Lichtenberg and Hohenschönhausen rather than personal income.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/ines-schwerdtner