# Klaus Ernst

# Klaus Ernst

Klaus Ernst (born 1 November 1954 in Munich) is a German politician and former trade-union official. He was a member of the Bundestag from 2005 through the 20th electoral term, returned on the state list of Bavaria, with Schweinfurt as his constituency. His affiliations ran from the [Social Democratic Party of Germany](/organizations/social-democratic-party-of-germany) through the Electoral Alternative for Labour and Social Justice (WASG) and [Die Linke](/organizations/die-linke) to the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (Bündnis [Sahra Wagenknecht](/people/sahra-wagenknecht), BSW).

After Realschule he passed a skilled-worker examination in 1974 and worked as an electromechanic and electrical technician, as a youth representative and works-council member, and as chair of the IG Metall local youth committee and of the Munich youth body of the German Trade Union Confederation. From 1979 to 1984 he studied economics and social economics, graduating as a Diplom-Volkswirt and a Diplom-Sozialökonom. He took part in organising the 1984 strike for a 35-hour week and afterwards became a secretary of [IG Metall](/organizations/ig-metall) in Stuttgart; from 1995 to 2010 he was the elected first plenipotentiary of IG Metall in Schweinfurt.

He had been an SPD member for 30 years when, on 15 June 2004, the Bavarian party expelled him and the Fürth IG Metall leader Thomas Händel for calling for a rival organisation. He took part in founding the WASG association and party. In 2007 the WASG merged with the Linkspartei, the successor of the [Party of Democratic Socialism](/organizations/party-of-democratic-socialism), to form Die Linke. Ernst was deputy federal chair of Die Linke from June 2007 to May 2010 and federal chair from May 2010 to June 2012, sharing that post with [Gesine Lötzsch](/people/gesine-lotzsch) from 15 May 2010 until she stepped down on 10 April 2012 because of her husband's illness.

In parliament he was a deputy chair of the Die Linke group and led its working groups on health and social security, on labour and social security, and later on the economy, labour and finance. The Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy named him chair on 31 January 2018, and on 15 December 2021 he became chair of the new Committee on Climate Protection and Energy. On 23 October 2023 he was among ten deputies, with Sahra Wagenknecht, who left Die Linke to prepare a new party. The Bundestag listed him as non-attached from 6 December 2023 and as a member of the BSW parliamentary group from 2 February 2024, in which he served as deputy chair. At the 2025 federal election the BSW received 4.981 percent of valid second votes and won no seats in the 21st Bundestag.

## Early life and education

### Childhood in Munich

Klaus Ernst was born on 1 November 1954 in Munich. The Munzinger archive states that, after his parents' divorce, he grew up with his mother and an authoritarian stepfather and moved out at the age of 15. A 2010 profile in the *taz* dated that break to 1969 and reported that he left his mother's flat and broke off school because he could no longer stand a violent stepfather. A short vita in the *Rhein-Zeitung* in 2013 likewise placed the departure, and the end of his schooling, in 1969, attributing them to differences with an adoptive father. He had been a pupil at a Realschule, the intermediate secondary school; the Bundestag biography, drawn from his own information, lists that schooling, while the press accounts say he did not finish it.

### Apprenticeship and youth representation

In 1970 he began an apprenticeship as an electromechanic (*Elektromechaniker*) at the Munich measurement-equipment firm Rohde & Schwarz. He passed the skilled-worker examination in 1974 and afterwards worked as an electromechanic and as an electrical technician. Munzinger records that he founded an apprentices' group, joined IG Metall in 1972 and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1974, and sat on the works council. The same archive names him as chair of the Munich youth organization of the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) from 1972 to 1975 and of IG Metall's local youth committee in Munich from 1974 to 1979. The Bundestag biography lists those offices, and membership of IG Metall since 1972, without the years; the *Rhein-Zeitung* dates his election as youth representative and works councillor to 1974. According to the *taz*, the firm at first did not want to keep him after the apprenticeship, and IG Metall pressed successfully for him to stay. The same profile reported that, at a company party on the Nockherberg in the early 1970s, he objected to the removal of the women who sold snacks in the plant and said management could pay for them from "the odd little million," which brought him the nickname "Milliönchen-Ernst." The SPD membership begun in 1974 lasted about thirty years.

### Studies in Hamburg

From 1979 to 1984 Ernst studied economics (*Volkswirtschaft*) and social economics (*Sozialökonomie*) at the Hochschule für Wirtschaft und Politik (HWP) in Hamburg, and graduated as a *Diplom-Volkswirt* and a *Diplom-Sozialökonom*. The college had grown out of the Akademie für Gemeinwirtschaft, opened in 1948 by trade unions and cooperatives, and from the start it admitted applicants without the *Abitur* if they passed an entrance test. Asked in 2009 how he had taken two diplomas without that certificate, Ernst wrote that the HWP allowed study without the *Abitur* after an extensive entrance examination, and that it was meant for people whom social and economic circumstances had kept out of higher education. A *taz* profile reported that the Böckler Foundation paid for the economics degree and that he worked in the holidays as a ski instructor in Austria. In a 2016 obituary in *nd* he named [the economist](/organizations/the-economist) Herbert Schui, a professor at the HWP, as his teacher: strict, soon a friend, and the person from whom students learned left-Keynesian economics. Renamed in 2001 the Hamburger Universität für Wirtschaft und Politik, the institution was integrated in 2005 into the University of Hamburg. The degrees led into full-time union work: the Bundestag biography records that he helped organize the 1984 strike for a 35-hour week and was employed as a union secretary at IG Metall in Stuttgart.

## Trade-union career

### Secretary in Stuttgart

In the last semester of his studies in Hamburg, with the diploma thesis still unfinished, colleagues in IG Metall brought Ernst to Stuttgart in 1984 to help organize the metalworkers’ strike for a 35-hour week. His Bundestag biography records that part in organizing the 1984 dispute and his later employment as a union secretary (*Gewerkschaftssekretär*) in the Stuttgart IG Metall office.

The strike was one of the hardest in the union’s history. It began on 14 May 1984 in the bargaining district of northern Württemberg and northern Baden, in Baden-Württemberg, and a week later in Hesse. About 57,500 employees in 23 plants stopped work, seeking a cut from 40 to 35 hours under the slogan “more time to live, love and laugh.” Employers answered with lockouts: first 155,000 workers in the strike districts, for whom IG Metall paid dispute benefit, then employees outside those districts. The union later put the number locked out at about half a million. Heinrich Franke, head of the Federal Employment Agency, withheld short-time allowance from people hit by these “cold” lockouts, an order IG Metall challenged in court. The settlement set weekly hours at 38.5, with more flexible plant schedules, and broke the 40-hour standard; by 1995, hours in the West German metal industry had fallen in steps to 35.

About six months after the strike, Klaus Zwickel hired Ernst as a secretary. Zwickel was then head of the large Stuttgart administrative office and later national chairman of IG Metall. A 2004 profile gives Ernst’s brief as organization, educational work and social plans for redundancies (*Sozialpläne*). A 2010 portrait in the *taz* calls Zwickel his mentor and describes the job as education and social plans. Ernst remained a Stuttgart secretary until 1995.

### IG Metall in Schweinfurt

In 1995 Ernst stood for, and was elected, first authorised representative (*Erster Bevollmächtigter*) of IG Metall in Schweinfurt, in Lower Franconia. The Bundestag biography dates the elected office from 1995 to 2010, and the side-activity register gives the end date as 30 June 2010. A 2004 account described the town’s large plants as the bearing maker SKF, FAG Kugelfischer (by then taken over by INA) and ZF Sachs, a maker of clutches and shock absorbers, and said local IG Metall membership was rising. The office covered the Main-Rhön region. In July 2010 the union said that, during Ernst’s time, membership had risen from about 19,500 to just under 22,000.

After Ernst entered the Bundestag in 2005 he kept the Schweinfurt post as paid work alongside the mandate. The register for the 16th Bundestag listed “first authorised representative” as a monthly payment in Stufe 2 of the disclosure scale. The 17th Bundestag’s list carried the same post, in Stufe 1, through 30 June 2010. On 15 May 2010 he became co-chair of Die Linke with Gesine Lötzsch. On 10 June the Schweinfurt office announced that he would resign at the end of the month. The successor named was Peter Kippes, until then second authorised representative: aged 48, a member since 1979, and elected to that deputy post four years earlier. Ernst left the office at the end of June, and the local organization held a formal farewell in mid-July. He had been an IG Metall member since 1972, and the Bundestag biography continued to list that membership after he gave up the paid post.

### Company supervisory boards

As an IG Metall officer Ernst also sat on company supervisory boards, the employee side of co-determination in large German firms. Parliamentary disclosures name two Schweinfurt mandates: member of the supervisory board of SKF GmbH, and member of the supervisory board of ZF Sachs AG, the components firm in the ZF group. In the 2008 register the ZF Sachs seat was an annual payment in Stufe 3. He left the SKF board on 30 June 2010 and the ZF Sachs board on 31 July 2010. A reply published on Abgeordnetenwatch said both seats were given up because of his election as party chair, and that board fees were passed on under the rules of the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung: 10 percent of gross pay up to €3,500 a year for each mandate, and 90 percent of any amount above that.

Separately, *Focus* reported in 2010 that, while an IG Metall official in Stuttgart, Ernst had been a member of the supervisory board of Porsche; the *taz* later described him as an employee representative on that board. The Porsche seat is not among the outside posts on the Bundestag biographies archived in 2008 and 2010, which list the Schweinfurt union office and the SKF and ZF Sachs boards.

## Break with the SPD and the WASG

### Opposition to Agenda 2010

In March 2004, as Chancellor [Gerhard Schröder](/people/gerhard-schroder)'s coalition of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and Alliance 90/[The Greens](/organizations/the-greens) implemented Agenda 2010 and the Hartz labour-market reforms, SPD members and trade unionists posted a three-page appeal as the Initiative Arbeit und soziale Gerechtigkeit. It described a "soziale Schieflage" — pressure on the unemployed, tax policy favouring the wealthy and companies, and health charges on patients and the poor — and left open a left-wing protest party if the SPD did not change course. Seven people signed, six of them [Social Democrats](/organizations/social-democrats). The initiators included Bavarian IG Metall officials, among them Klaus Ernst in Schweinfurt and Thomas Händel in Fürth, and the Hamburg economist Herbert Schui. [Franz Müntefering](/people/franz-muntefering), designated to become SPD chair, warned of expulsions. Michael Sommer, chair of the German Trade Union Confederation, called a new party a wrong path, and IG Metall chair Jürgen Peters said the unions needed different policies, not another party. The signatories had not decided whether to join the Wahlalternative 2006, a separate circle of unionists and former Social Democrats that was planning a forum in Berlin.

### Expulsion and party foundation

On 15 June 2004 the Bavarian SPD arbitration body expelled Ernst and Händel, members for 30 and 32 years. Deputy state chair Florian Pronold cited the statute against anyone calling for a rival organisation. Händel said the reasons treated doubt about the SPD's credibility as party-damaging in itself. IG Metall called the initiative a private matter of "the citizens Händel and Ernst". The five co-founders had charged the SPD with social imbalance and threatened a new party; Händel said they would form an association with the Berlin Wahlalternative. The next day Peter Vetter and Gerd Lobodda of Nuremberg were also expelled, and a hearing for Günther Schachner was postponed; state parliamentary leader Franz Maget called a new party bound to fail.

On 3 July 2004 in Berlin the two currents merged as the association Wahlalternative Arbeit und soziale Gerechtigkeit e.V., later known as the WASG. Four equal spokespersons were to lead it. Ernst, already outside the SPD, was one of them, not sole chair of the association. He called for lifting the new burdens on the long-term unemployed, a statutory minimum wage, shorter hours, a top tax rate of at least 47 percent and heavier taxes on wealth.

A still-incomplete membership ballot, announced on 20 December 2004, had 4,116 yes votes out of 4,239 counted (96.2 percent). Händel set the founding for 22 January 2005, with a regular executive to be elected at a congress on 6–7 May, and Ernst said talks with former SPD chair [Oskar Lafontaine](/people/oskar-lafontaine) continued. On 22 January the Länder council in Göttingen unanimously founded the party, reported as Partei Arbeit und soziale Gerechtigkeit (ASG), and elected Händel, Ernst, the economist Axel Troost and Sabine Lösing to a managing federal executive. All four already sat on the previous board: the new office was collective, not a single federal chair. It planned to run in the North Rhine-Westphalia election on 22 May, and its first federal congress, in Dortmund on the weekend of 7 May, drew about 350 delegates.

### Alliance for the 2005 election

With a Bundestag election expected in September, the WASG turned toward the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). On 18 June 2005 a congress in Cologne elected Lafontaine the WASG's provisional North Rhine-Westphalian lead candidate, by 124 of 162 votes; he called a pact with the PDS a historic chance. On 3 July in Kassel, WASG delegates welcomed candidates on open PDS lists, left the final decision to the members, and backed talks on a joint left opposition in the Bundestag and, after the election, on a joint party. Lafontaine and former PDS chair [Gregor Gysi](/people/gregor-gysi) were the intended lead candidates.

On 17 July a PDS congress in Berlin adopted the name Die Linkspartei by 311 votes of 333 cast (74.6 percent), above the required two-thirds of 417 delegates. "PDS" could remain a supplementary label, at each state branch's choice, and a WASG membership vote had already approved cooperation. Ernst told the delegates there was a chance of a strong left force; the official results later listed the party as Die Linkspartei.

In Bavaria, which WASG officials called their heartland, only Ernst, placed first on the Linkspartei list, had a realistic chance of a seat. WASG nominees Fritz Schmalzbauer and Anny Heike lost contested ballots for third and fourth place, and the *taz* quoted Ernst — calling him the WASG chair — describing that result as a scandal. Federal returning officer Johann Hahlen had warned that more than 25 percent of list places for a partner could be an unlawful list combination. Ernst said he would accept his place, and that the dispute showed there had been no deal.

On 18 September 2005 Die Linke won 8.7 percent of second votes (4,118,194) and 54 seats, clearing the threshold the PDS had missed in 2002 with 4.0 percent. In Bavaria it took 3.4 percent (244,701 votes), against 0.7 percent in 2002. Ernst did not win Schweinfurt, held by [Christian Social Union](/organizations/christian-social-union-in-bavaria) parliamentary leader Michael Glos with 54.1 percent, and entered on the Bavarian list. The Bundestag biography for that term lists him as a member from 2005 and records his part in founding the association and the party after the expulsion. The 2005 pact was not yet a merger: on 15 June 2007 the Berlin-Charlottenburg court registered Die Linke, and the founding congress followed the next day. In the same report Ernst, described as WASG chief, objected to PDS chair [Lothar Bisky](/people/lothar-bisky) that too many of that party's proposed executive candidates already held parliamentary seats.

## Role in Die Linke

### Merger and deputy leadership

On Saturday 16 June 2007, delegates of the eastern Linkspartei.PDS — the renamed Party of Democratic Socialism — and the western Wahlalternative Arbeit und soziale Gerechtigkeit (WASG) met in Berlin and merged as Die Linke. About 750 delegates approved the fusion with one vote against and two abstentions. They elected Oskar Lafontaine, a former chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany nominated by the WASG, and Lothar Bisky, the outgoing Linkspartei chair, as equal leaders, with 87.9 and 83.6 percent. The deputy chairs were Katja Kipping and Katina Schubert from the Linkspartei and Klaus Ernst and Ulrike Zerhau from the WASG; [Dietmar Bartsch](/people/dietmar-bartsch) continued as federal managing director. Gregor Gysi, chair of the joint Bundestag group, called it the first genuine German-German unification after the GDR. The new party reported about 72,000 members. Ernst, from the WASG's trade-union wing, held a deputy chair from that congress until May 2010.

### Federal co-chairmanship

Lafontaine had announced in January 2010, after cancer surgery, that he would step down; Bisky said he would concentrate on the [European Parliament](/organizations/european-parliament). At the federal congress in Rostock on 15 May 2010, delegates elected Gesine Lötzsch and Ernst to succeed them. Lötzsch received 92.8 percent, then the strongest result in an election to the Linke chair. Ernst, a 55-year-old Bavarian trade unionist, received 74.9 percent of the delegates; Heinz-Josef Weich, a local politician from Lower Saxony, received 13.9 percent. His candidacy had been disputed, including over claims that he had helped force Bartsch out as managing director, and reports at the time treated 74.9 percent as stronger than many had expected. Lötzsch promised continuity on the minimum wage, pensions and opposition to the Afghanistan deployment; Ernst appealed for unity. The congress also elected Sahra Wagenknecht as a deputy chair.

The two years that followed were marked by losses. In 2011 Die Linke lost its share of the Berlin state government with the SPD. At the March 2012 election in the Saarland, with Lafontaine as lead candidate, it lost more than five percentage points. *[Der Spiegel](/organizations/der-spiegel)* reported on 6 April 2012 that membership had fallen below 70,000 for the first time since the merger, from more than 78,000 in 2009, and that polls in Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia pointed to a risk of falling under five percent.

On 10 April 2012 Lötzsch resigned. She cited her husband's illness and said she could no longer be away from Berlin so often; she would concentrate on her Bundestag seat. Ernst said that, in a difficult period, they had worked together with trust and mutual respect. A congress to elect a new executive was already set for early June in Göttingen. There, on 2–3 June 2012, Ernst did not stand. He said the party was coming apart — ejected from western state parliaments, weaker in eastern polls — and accepted a share of the blame: a letter to Fidel Castro, a debate on communism and a controversy over antisemitism had displaced poverty, precarious work and the minimum wage. A split, he said, would break the founding promise of a single Left.

In the women-only first round Kipping, until then a deputy chair, won 67.1 percent against Dora Heyenn of Hamburg, on 29.3 percent. In the second round [Bernd Riexinger](/people/bernd-riexinger), the Baden-Württemberg chair and a figure of Lafontaine's trade-union wing, took 297 votes (53.5 percent) to Bartsch's 251 (45.2 percent). Wagenknecht declined to run, saying she did not want to sharpen the polarization. Gysi warned that if the new leadership could not hold the party together, a split would be preferable to what he called a ruined partnership carried on through denunciation. Lafontaine replied that there was no reason to speak of a split.

### Exit in 2023

On 23 October 2023 Ernst was one of ten members of the Bundestag group who resigned from Die Linke together with Wagenknecht. They included [Amira Mohamed Ali](/people/amira-mohamed-ali), who had shared the chair of the Bundestag group with Bartsch. They presented the association Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, from which a party was to be founded in 2024. Ernst told the *Abendzeitung* that the step was painful because he had helped found the WASG and Die Linke, but that the party had moved away from representing employees, pensioners and people on ordinary incomes. He objected to a course he called "greener than the Greens," to solidarity with road-blocking climate protests, and to what he described as support for immigration without limits, and he pointed to election results as evidence that many voters no longer followed the party. Bartsch called the ten resignations irresponsible and unacceptable: they had left the party but wanted to remain in the group of 38.

The resignations put the group's status in question at once. A Bundestag faction must include at least five percent of the members of the house from the same party; in that term the minimum was 37. With 38 members, the group fell short once the ten had left the party. Wagenknecht said the ten wanted to stay in the faction until the new party was founded, citing the staff and an orderly transition, but that the Linke group could not continue beyond the start of 2024. On 6 December 2023 the faction dissolved and entered liquidation of its obligations and assets. Its former members, Ernst among them, sat thereafter as non-attached deputies. Because a committee chair must be a full member, Die Linke also lost the chair of the Committee on Climate Action and Energy, which Ernst held.

## Bundestag career

### Elections and mandates

Klaus Ernst was a member of the Bundestag from 2005 through the end of the 20th electoral term in 2025. At the elections of 2005, 2009, 2013, 2017 and 2021 he stood in the Schweinfurt constituency in Bavaria and entered on the Bavarian state list of the Left. The district seat remained with the Christian Social Union (CSU). The biography archived for the 20th term (2021–2025) is the Bundestag’s record of the last mandate.

In 2005 the constituency was number 251. Die Linke. received 9,848 first votes (6.4 percent); Michael Glos (CSU) won the seat with 82,989 (54.1 percent). Ernst was the Left’s direct candidate and first on its Bavarian list, and the directory of members elected from state lists names him in that place. From 2009 the district was number 250. Ernst was again the direct candidate and again list place 1. [The Left](/organizations/the-left-slovenia) took 14,803 first votes (10.4 percent) and 13,317 second votes (9.2 percent); Glos held the seat with 66,253 first votes (46.4 percent), so Ernst returned on the list.

In 2013 the Left’s first votes in constituency 250 were 7,514 (5.4 percent) and its second votes 6,940 (5.0 percent). The CSU candidate won with 54.8 percent. The biography for the 18th term records Ernst as elected on the Bavarian list for that constituency. In 2017 the district returning officer credited Klaus Friedrich Ernst with 12,091 first votes, 7.8 percent of 154,269 valid first votes; [Anja Weisgerber](/people/anja-weisgerber) (CSU) was elected with 73,901, and the Left’s second votes were 10,422 (6.7 percent). In 2021 he again entered for constituency 250 on the Bavarian list, with 6,552 first votes (4.2 percent). The Left’s second votes there were 4,928 (3.2 percent), and the CSU kept the district on 40.9 percent.

### Group offices

Offices in the Left’s Bundestag group appear in biographies the parliament publishes from members’ own information. The 20th-term text says that from 2005 to 2009 he was deputy chair and head of the working group on health and social security. On 23 November 2005 the *taz* reported that he, then on the federal executive of the Labour and Social Justice – The Electoral Alternative (WASG), had been elected a deputy chair of the Linkspartei group after missing a vice-chair post in September, when women in the party had pressed for a woman in the role.

The same account says that from 2009 to 2010 he led the working group on labour and social security and that from 2010 to 2012, as party chair, he was a voting member of the group executive. The 18th-term biography describes membership of that executive from 2005 to 2012 and adds that in 2012–2013 he was a full member of the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs. From 2013 until February 2018 the later biography again lists him as deputy group chair and as head of the working group on the economy, labour and finance. For the 18th term it also lists full membership of the labour and social affairs committee, the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy, and the Joint Committee.

The Left group, previously 38 members, dissolved on 6 December 2023 after departures left it below the 37 required of a *Fraktion*; its former members, including Ernst, sat without a group. On 2 February 2024 the Bundestag recognised ten of them as the group of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. An editorial note, separate from the self-reported career text, records Ernst as non-attached from 6 December 2023 and a member of the BSW group from 2 February 2024.

### Committee chairmanships

On 31 January 2018 the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy, with 49 members, was constituted under Vice-President [Wolfgang Kubicki](/people/wolfgang-kubicki) (FDP) and chose Ernst as chair. He succeeded [Peter Ramsauer](/people/peter-ramsauer) (CSU), chair in the previous term. Matthias Heider (CDU/CSU) was named deputy chair on 21 February 2018. Ernst held the post through the rest of the 19th term.

For the 20th term a Committee on Climate Protection and Energy was created. At its constituent sitting on 15 December 2021, led by Vice-President Katrin Göring-Eckardt (Alliance 90/The Greens), the 34-member committee made Ernst chair. The Bundestag noted his previous chairmanship of Economic Affairs and Energy, his membership since 2005, and his return on the Bavarian list with 4.2 percent of the Schweinfurt first votes on 26 September 2021. Full seats went ten to the Social Democratic Party, nine to the CDU/CSU, five to the Greens, four each to the FDP and the AfD, and two to the Left.

He lost that chair when the Left group dissolved. The minutes of the committee’s 100th sitting, on 13 March 2024, record the loss and state that, under the Bundestag’s rules of procedure and an agreement of the Council of Elders, the SPD held the right to propose a successor. Katrin Zschau (SPD) was elected in a secret ballot by 22 votes to 3, with 4 abstentions, out of 29 votes cast. [Hans-Peter Friedrich](/people/hans-peter-friedrich) (CDU/CSU), who had presided in the interim, was thanked for doing so.

The 20th-term biography lists him as a full member of the Committee on Internal Affairs and Heimat. Under the disclosure rules it also records his membership of the advisory board for fundamental savings-bank policy questions at the Sparkassenverband Bayern in Munich, with gross sums he reported of 1,650 euro for 2021 and 3,300 euro for 2022. The Bundestag states that the biographical entries rest on the member’s own information.

## Political positions

### Labour, welfare and industry

Ernst's welfare line stayed close to his years as an IG Metall official in Schweinfurt. A photograph in his Bundestag office shows him at a union rally against the Riester pension; he told the *Berliner Zeitung* in October 2023 that it dated from 2002 or 2003, before he entered parliament. As federal chair of Die Linke, he told the WAZ group on 2 December 2011 that subsidies for Riester and occupational pensions should end, and that savers should for a limited time be able to move that capital into the statutory pension without loss. Organising pensions through financial markets, he said, was like "building a hospital on Mount Etna."

On 17 January 2011 he called Agenda 2010 a wage-cutting programme and "a catastrophe," citing a 4.5 per cent real-wage fall since 2000, and named a statutory minimum wage, repeal of retirement at 67 and a higher basic benefit. On 25 February 2010, after the Federal [Constitutional Court](/organizations/constitutional-court) had held the benefit calculation unconstitutional, he told the Bundestag that the Hartz laws falsely assumed people did not want to work and that wages were too high, and asked for a sanction-free minimum of €500 plus housing. The CDU member Paul Lehrieder replied that a flat €500 would repeat the error the court had condemned.

On 4 December 2023 he told the *Frankfurter Rundschau* that the car industry still secured hundreds of thousands of livelihoods, that he still drove a Porsche, and that ending combustion-engine production in 2035 would not shrink a growing world fleet, so lower emissions also required synthetic or biofuels. On 28 May 2024 he was the first-named sponsor of a Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht motion calling one-sided electric-car policy a serious industrial error threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs, and asking the government to press the European Union to allow new petrol and diesel cars after 2035.

### Energy and climate

Before the full-scale [Russian invasion of Ukraine](/facts/2022-russian-invasion-of-ukraine), Ernst treated pipeline gas as an industrial and a climate choice. In a *Frankfurter Rundschau* essay on 12 February 2021, as chair of the economic and energy committee, he wrote that Nord Stream 2 should be finished: pipeline gas had financial and environmental advantages over shipped fracking gas, and Russian gas would reach Europe anyway, only more dearly. He called the arrest of [Alexei Navalny](/people/alexei-navalny) and the treatment of Russian demonstrators unacceptable, but said Alliance 90/The Greens were using those events to demand a halt they had always wanted. Sanctions, he added, had failed and harmed Germany while pushing Russia toward China.

The reading was disputed in his own party. In *nd* on 17 December 2021 he said Die Linke had lost votes by trying to be "greener than the Greens," and that employees must not pay for climate policy mainly through dearer fuel and heating. An open letter whose first signatories included Luisa Neubauer answered that he had "again and again turned against effective climate-policy positions and the programme of the Left."

After the invasion the supply case met a party decision the other way. On 6 July 2022 he told the *Rheinische Post* that, despite an illegal war, Berlin should talk to Russia, "if necessary also about putting Nord Stream 2 into operation for a limited period" if gas could not otherwise be secured, because energy sanctions left "our citizens and our economy" bearing the cost. On 11 July he told n-tv that, choosing "which of the villains" to buy from, he preferred "the cheapest route, and that is Russia." The Left's Erfurt congress the previous month had resolved that, given the war, Nord Stream 2 should not be commissioned. Dietmar Bartsch said the party and its Bundestag group were not seeking such talks; co-chairs [Janine Wissler](/people/janine-wissler) and [Martin Schirdewan](/people/martin-schirdewan) cited the congress line of targeted sanctions on oligarchs and non-commissioning. Ernst told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur he meant only two or three months if Nord Stream 1 failed, which he said did not break the resolution.

### Foreign affairs and migration

He separated condemnation of the war from support for weapons. On 11 July 2022 he called the war "without any doubt contrary to international law," while rejecting energy sanctions. On 28 April, intervening on the motion "Defending peace and freedom in Europe," he quoted [Olaf Scholz](/people/mig-olaf-scholz)'s warning in *Der Spiegel* of escalation toward nuclear war and told [Friedrich Merz](/people/friedrich-merz) that each further step brought such a confrontation closer. Applause came from Die Linke and from [the Alternative](/organizations/the-alternative) for Germany. The motion, which did not rule out heavy weapons and sought a stronger NATO presence on the eastern flank, passed by 586 votes to 100, with seven abstentions; Ernst voted no.

Migration was a stated reason for leaving Die Linke for the circle around Sahra Wagenknecht. In December 2023 he told the *Frankfurter Rundschau* that leaders around Katja Kipping and Bernd Riexinger had put "unlimited immigration" ahead of employees and pensioners. It undermined asylum and overloaded municipalities, he argued, to the AfD's benefit; people without a claim should be returned, while asylum stayed intact and migrants were integrated rather than given a special status. In February 2025, after BSW deputies sided with the Union and the AfD on stricter asylum rules, 28 Bavarian IG Metall officials wrote that he had "made common cause with racists, not only but above all those of the AfD." He replied that the charges were "false and silly."

## Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht

### Founding and the Bundestag group

On 23 October 2023 Klaus Ernst left Die Linke with Sahra Wagenknecht and eight other members of the Bundestag. At a press conference in Berlin, Wagenknecht presented Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, a project first organised as an association to prepare a party for the 2024 European election. She said the deputies would remain in the Left parliamentary group until the party existed, citing its employees and an orderly transition, and that the group could no longer exist from January 2024 at the latest. Dietmar Bartsch, chair of the 38-member group, called the departure of the ten deputies irresponsible and unacceptable.

The party was founded on 8 January 2024, behind closed doors in a Berlin hotel, as Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht – für Vernunft und Gerechtigkeit, with Wagenknecht and Amira Mohamed Ali as co-chairs. On 12 December 2023 the ten deputies had already constituted themselves as a group; Wagenknecht was elected chair unanimously and Ernst deputy chair. The Left group entered liquidation on 6 December 2023 after several deputies left it and it fell below the minimum of 37 members, so its former members sat without a parliamentary group. Ernst was non-attached from that date and a member of the BSW group from 2 February 2024, when the Bundestag recognised the group, with the votes of the SPD, the Greens and the FDP against the CDU/CSU and the AfD.

### Bavaria and the 2025 election

On 16 November 2024 the BSW founded its thirteenth state association, in Bavaria, at a meeting in Ingolstadt attended by about 80 of the roughly 100 members the party then had in the state. In secret ballots with no opposing candidates, Ernst was elected co-chair with 84.5 percent and Irmgard Freihoffer, a Regensburg city councillor and former member of Die Linke, with 88.7 percent. Wagenknecht did not attend. Ernst called peace policy the party's "DNA", described [President Volodymyr Zelenskyy](/people/volodymyr-zelenskyy) as driving the war and trying to draw Germany into it, and said money for German education was better spent than money spent in Ukraine; he said he found it intolerable to be called a *Putin-Versteher*.

On 15 December 2024 in Erlangen the association adopted its Bundestag list. Ernst was elected lead candidate with 77.9 percent of the votes cast and told Bayerischer Rundfunk he was aiming for five percent in Bavaria. Second place went to Simone Ketterl, also formerly of Die Linke; Freihoffer was fifth.

At the election of 23 February 2025 the BSW received 2,472,947 second votes nationwide, 4.981 percent, and missed the five-percent threshold. In Bavaria it received 246,518 second votes, 3.1 percent. Ernst was the direct candidate in constituency 218, Munich-South, where he won 4,593 first votes (2.5 percent); the party's second-vote share there was 5,585 votes, also 3.1 percent. Seats from the Bavarian list depended on the national result, which the party did not reach.

### Internal disputes

In November 2025 the Bavarian leadership divided in public. Co-chair Freihoffer, deputy state chair Ute May and board member Stefan Scheingraber said a state-executive decision had in effect annulled elections in the Upper Palatinate district and ordered a fresh ballot so that Ernst could remove Scheingraber, the district chair. They accused him of trying to silence critics and of using access to members' contact details as a means of discipline, and with 24 other members they appealed to the party's arbitration court. Ernst called the allegations groundless: a formal error in the original invitation required the assembly to be repeated if electoral authorities were to recognise the district, and membership data were administered by the federal party, not by individual state-executive members.

He also rejected help for the AfD into government. In August 2026, after Wagenknecht had said the BSW might abstain in a third ballot for minister-president in Saxony-Anhalt—which, on the polling then, could elect an AfD candidate—Ernst told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that an AfD government would not be a democratic new beginning. As a trade unionist, he said, helping an AfD head of government into office was "simply not conceivable", and he had not joined the BSW to experiment with the AfD.

On 13 October 2026 the *Augsburger Allgemeine* reported that Ernst, still on the federal executive but, as of the previous weekend, no longer a Bavarian co-chair, had made his membership conditional on a clarification of the party's relationship with the AfD. At the state congress in Meeder on 10–11 October 2026, Irmgard Freihoffer was confirmed as co-chair and Julia von Wegen was elected in Ernst's place; the Bavarian association's executive page listed the two as state co-chairs. The occasion was the BSW's announced support for electing AfD deputy Tobias Rausch president of the Saxony-Anhalt Landtag, and BSW politicians' attendance at an event of the magazine *Compact* in Magdeburg where AfD politicians were also guests. Ernst called a "creeping shift of the BSW's course to the right" unacceptable and contrary to the founding consensus, said the federal executive had never decided to tolerate dealings with the AfD, and said the party must not help the AfD into office if that could be prevented. The paper reported the threat to leave; it did not report a resignation.

## Public image and controversies

### Wealth, cars and the “Porsche-Klaus” label

On 13 August 2010, while Klaus Ernst was co-chair of Die Linke, the Süddeutsche Zeitung published Uwe Ritzer’s “Mein Haus, mein Porsche, mein Problem.” A Porsche more than twenty years old, and a leased mountain hut near Ellmau in Tyrol that still had no electricity, were, to his critics, signs of a showy life. The paper put his income above 13,000 euros a month. Ernst declined to comment. The “Porsche-Klaus” label was already in Süddeutsche headlines. The taz later wrote that he drove a white Porsche as party chair, had represented IG Metall employees on Porsche’s supervisory board, and by 2021 drove an Audi.

Focus, citing group chair Gregor Gysi, reported a Bundestag salary of 7,668 euros, 3,500 euros from the party for the co-chairmanship—co-chair Gesine Lötzsch waived hers—and 1,913 euros from the group. Ernst put the net figure at 5,000 euros. After criticism of pay for both offices, Gysi said on 5 September 2010 that Ernst would propose dropping the group supplement of about 2,000 euros; Focus wrote that Ernst had rejected the accusations in interviews. On 27 October 2010 Berlin prosecutors dropped a fraud and breach-of-trust inquiry, open since July, into three flights to union and supervisory-board meetings billed to the Bundestag: most were mandate-related, and the rest were treated as mistakes.

In October 2023 the Federal Social Court dismissed his suit against the Deutsche Rentenversicherung (B 5 R 49/21 R). Half his statutory old-age pension was suspended while he drew parliamentary pay. He argued that the suspension breached property, equality and a member’s independence. The court disagreed, holding it a lawful bar on double public maintenance and not excessive.

### Climate-committee nomination

After the 2021 election Die Linke could chair only one committee and put Ernst forward for the new Committee on Climate Protection and Energy. On 10 December the open letter “Nicht-euer-Ernst” said that anyone who promoted Nord Stream 2 with “Gazprom-Schröder” while condemning the climate movement should be disqualified. Signatories included Luisa Neubauer of [Fridays for Future](/organizations/fridays-for-future), also a Green, and Left state co-chair Melanie Wery-Sims. The taz reported that Ernst, then chair of the economics and energy committee, had invited former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, by then linked to the Gazprom subsidiary Nord Stream, to a hearing; that he warned against becoming “greener than the Greens” and against closeness to Fridays for Future; and that he had called a 2030 end to combustion engines “a certain hostility to cars,” favoring biogas or synthetic fuels. He did not reply to the taz.

The group executive backed him seven to one. On 14 December members preferred him to Bernd Riexinger by 23 votes to 13, with one abstention; on 15 December the committee, under Vice-President Katrin Göring-Eckardt, made him chair of its 34 members. About 10,000 people signed the letter. Ernst told the Süddeutsche Zeitung he took the protest with humor—“Der Porsche steht im Winter sehr umweltfreundlich in der Garage”—and that it at least publicized the committee.

### Trade-union criticism

In February 2025 more than two dozen Bavarian IG Metall officials, or their deputies, wrote to Ernst, Bavarian leader of the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht and deputy chair of its Bundestag group. Bayerischer Rundfunk, which saw the letter, reported that they accused him of having “made common cause with racists,” above all those of the Alternative for Germany, by voting with the AfD for the CDU/CSU asylum bill, the “Zustrombegrenzungsgesetz.” They asked whether the union was still the right place for him, and told Sahra Wagenknecht that “Es können nicht alle kommen!” reversed the debate and blamed refugees. The Bundestag rejected the bill on 31 January 2025, 349 to 338; seven of the ten BSW members voted yes and three did not vote.

Ernst, an IG Metall member since the 1970s, called it an “impertinence” and “bottomless” to brand him a racist and said he would not leave. He demanded an apology for charges he called false and silly, and for an “unbelievable simple-mindedness” that accused him of changing sides and ignored how a unitary union should treat CDU and CSU members. Horst Ott, head of IG Metall in Bavaria, said that voting for the bill with an AfD he called “in large part far-right,” on what he termed the day of Holocaust remembrance, was “disrespectful and appalling.”

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/klaus-ernst