Luigi Pantisano

Luigi Pantisano (born 28 July 1979 in Waiblingen) is a German architect and urban planner and a politician of Die Linke. He has been a member of the Bundestag since the 21st legislative term was constituted on 25 March 2025, sitting for the Baden-Württemberg state list after also standing in constituency 258, Stuttgart I. Since 20 June 2026 he has been federal co-chair of the party, together with Ines Schwerdtner, in succession to Jan van Aken.

He has described growing up in Waiblingen and for a time in Calabria as the son of immigrants from Italy, and an expected path, for a migrant child in the 1980s and 1990s, of Hauptschule, an apprenticeship and work outside the professions. After an apprenticeship as an architectural draughtsman from 1995 to 1998 and a Fachhochschulreife in 1998–1999, he studied architecture from 2000 to 2005 at the Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, then urban planning from 2005 to 2008 at the University of Stuttgart. He has held the degree of Diplom-Ingenieur since 2008. From 2009 to 2014 he was a neighbourhood manager for the city of Konstanz, and from 2011 to 2015 a research staff member at the University of Stuttgart’s Institute of Urban Planning, with teaching appointments in Stuttgart and Konstanz that continued until 2024.

From 2015 to 2016 he was political managing director of the SÖS–Linke group in the Stuttgart council, and he was a city councillor there from 2016 to 2025. He joined Die Linke in 2017 and worked until 2025 as a scientific assistant to the Bundestag member Bernd Riexinger, and he has opposed Stuttgart 21, arguing that the surface terminus should remain. In the October 2020 Konstanz mayoral runoff, the incumbent, Uli Burchardt of the Christian Democratic Union, won with 49.5 percent of the vote to Pantisano’s 45.1 percent; the independent Andreas Matt took 5.1 percent, and turnout was 61.4 percent. On his own account to the Bundestag, he was deputy state spokesperson of Die Linke in Baden-Württemberg in 2021 and a member of the party’s federal executive from 2022 to 2024.

In Stuttgart I at the 2025 federal election, 14,203 first votes (8.8 percent) were cast for the Left list’s constituency candidate, and the party’s second-vote share in the district was 17,530 (10.8 percent). The direct seat went to Simone Fischer of Alliance 90/The Greens with 45,667 votes (28.3 percent), five votes ahead of Elisabeth Schick-Ebert of the CDU. Pantisano entered the Bundestag in second place on the Baden-Württemberg list. The parliament’s biography lists him as a deputy member of the Transport Committee and of the Committee on the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety.

At the federal congress in Potsdam he was elected co-chair on 20 June 2026 with no opposing candidate and about 53 percent of the vote; Der Spiegel put the share at 53.3 percent of delegates, while Schwerdtner was confirmed with nearly 86 percent. Van Aken had declined to stand again for health reasons. In a Bild interview during the congress he said he currently saw no difference between the policy of the CDU, which he called fascist, and that of the Alternative for Germany; on 22 June he told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that the formulation had been shortened and was wrong in that form, apologised in particular to CDU politicians who argue for a firewall against the AfD, and said that his criticism of the Union’s course stood.

Early life and family

Parents and migration

Luigi Pantisano was born on 28 July 1979 in Waiblingen, the seat of the Rems-Murr-Kreis in Baden-Württemberg; the Bundestag biography that records the date is based on his own statements. He is the youngest of four sons of Maria and Giuseppe Pantisano, from Cariati Marina in Calabria. The parents left in the 1960s as Gastarbeiter for industrial work in Germany. Alfonso Pantisano, born in Waiblingen in 1974, has described a 1966 move from their fishing village to the Stuttgart area for work, and has written that they learned the word “Arbeit” on the train. His mother, 19 when the eldest brother, Cataldo, was born in 1967, would say they always had to give “a little more,” because nobody there gave them anything.

Luigi has presented that household as a matter of class as well as migration. Before becoming co-chair of Die Linke he told Corriere della Sera that his mother had gone to school only into the second year and his father into the fifth, that the four boys shared one room, and that the family was not poor because the parents worked mornings, afternoons, evenings and weekends. At the party congress he called himself the son of Italian guest workers who had laboured so their children would have a better future, and said he had learned from them how to fight; he has also said that being the child of immigrants was “at the origin” of his decision to enter politics, and that as a Gastarbeiter child he spent years being looked down on. The Schwäbische Post reported his account that both parents spent their working lives in industry, that his mother also cleaned in other homes, and that the family, unable to rent as an Italian couple with four children, bought a flat they were still paying for at 75. Alfonso has written that the jobs included a Klett factory making schoolbooks. Corriere della Sera reported his recollection that some 1960s pubs and restaurants posted signs barring “dogs and Italians.”

He holds German and Italian citizenship. In the 2025 campaign he wrote that he had been born, raised, schooled and was working in Germany, and that the CDU had nonetheless questioned his German identity for as long as he could remember.

Childhood between Waiblingen and Calabria

The brothers did not grow up together. Alfonso has written that Cataldo was sent at seven months to a grandmother in Calabria for twelve years, then to a boarding school; that Leonardo moved between Germany and Italy; and that he himself was placed at seven in a boarding school near Trento for children of Italians working abroad. Only Luigi, he wrote, stayed with the parents. Luigi’s own account is that after a two-year stay in Calabria he has lived in Germany since the age of six with his parents and three brothers; a Calabrian report says part of that childhood was with his grandparents in Cariati. The Schwäbische Post, citing him, reported that because the parents had gone back to Italy for a time after his birth, he understood “not a word” of German when he started school in Waiblingen. A teacher drilled him in the corridor; he has said the first four words were “Apfel, Baum, Haus, Garten,” and that a primary-school report later stated he could now take part in class.

The Zeitungsverlag Waiblingen called him a Gastarbeiter child who attended the Staufer-Hauptschule in Waiblingen, and the Schwäbische Post reported that he completed that leaving certificate and then the Werkrealschule. SWR reported that he grew up in Waiblingen and for a time in Calabria, and that in the 2025 campaign he often named the path he said had been marked out for a migrant child—Hauptschule, an apprenticeship and non-academic work—and a mother who, besides factory work, cleaned in classmates’ homes.

The Zeitungsverlag Waiblingen also reported that all four children were born at the town’s then district hospital, and that after Alfonso came out as gay at 19 his parents put him out of the flat. Luigi, then 14, later wrote that he had not understood why his brother had to leave and had decided no child should again be cast out for coming out as gay, lesbian, trans or queer; Alfonso has written that Luigi turned that experience into politics. SWR has noted that Luigi has publicly backed Alfonso, a gay Berlin politician of the SPD who in 2023 became the city’s queer commissioner.

Education and professional work

Architectural and planning studies

Pantisano reached higher education by a second-chance route. A 2020 Südkurier profile, drawing on his own account, reported that he had gone from a Hauptschule through a Bauzeichner apprenticeship and the Fachhochschulreife to completed studies in architecture and urban planning. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament notes rests on members’ own statements, dates the apprenticeship to 1995–1998 and the Fachhochschulreife to 1998–1999. Bauzeichner is a recognised three-year dual training occupation for preparing construction drawings and other technical documents. SWR reported in 2026 that he has been a Diplom-Ingenieur since 2008.

The Bundestag entry places architecture studies from 2000 to 2005 at the Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, without saying whether the Tokyo period was a full course or a stay inside the Stuttgart degree, and without naming a separate Japanese qualification. That Hochschule converted its programmes to bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the winter semester of 2005 and phased out Diplom courses. From 2005 to 2008 he studied urban planning (Stadtplanung) at the University of Stuttgart. In a 2020 candidate questionnaire he gave his occupation as Stadtplaner (Dipl.-Ing.). The Bundestag lists him as Stadtplaner and Architekt and records membership of the Architektenkammer Baden-Württemberg. In that state those titles may be used only by people entered on the chamber’s register.

Under Stipendien the biography lists the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, the Baden-Württemberg-Stiftung, the Robert Bosch Stiftung and a Marshall Memorial Fellowship, without years or scheme names. The Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung was recognised in 1992 as the political foundation associated with the Party of Democratic Socialism, now Die Linke; its Studienwerk funds students and doctoral researchers selected for academic results and for social or political engagement. The Marshall Memorial Fellowship, run since 1982 by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, is a mid-career leadership programme of seminars and transatlantic travel, not a student grant.

Neighbourhood management, research and teaching

From 1999 to 2019 the joint federal–state programme Soziale Stadt financed urban-development work in districts with social and physical disadvantages; in 2020 its main lines passed into Sozialer Zusammenhalt. The successor programme can fund a local Quartiersmanagement. Managers accompany building projects, act as contacts on site, and are expected to mediate between residents and the administration and among local organisations, while drawing residents into planning.

In Konstanz the edge-of-town area Berchen-Öhmdwiesen—about 38 hectares and roughly 5,500 residents, in five- and nine-storey blocks, with a skatepark, allotments and two schools—was in the programme from 2004 to 2014, with about €1.15 million in federal aid. Relative to the city it had higher shares of people with a migration history and of recipients of transfer benefits. Priorities were the residential environment, social infrastructure and integration; a “Grüner Bogen” linked green spaces, playgrounds and the allotments.

The federal case study, which does not name the post-holder, says that in 2010 the neighbourhood manager started an intercultural garden and urged the gardeners to form an association so they could hold the lease. About ten people founded Nachbarschaftsgärten Bodensee. That year a Quartierszentrum opened in a former doctor’s surgery, with meeting rooms, childcare space and a cafeteria. In 2012, when the manager’s contract ended, the association—renamed Miteinander in Konstanz—took over the centre for the city. The funded measure closed in 2014; the centre continued.

The Bundestag biography lists Pantisano as Quartiersmanager for the City of Konstanz from 2009 to 2014 and as a founder and board member of Miteinander in Konstanz e.V. from 2010 to 2014; the association is still among his memberships. A 2020 Südkurier portrait used the same years for his work in Berchen/Öhmdwiesen. An earlier first-person text on Abgeordnetenwatch instead gives 2008–2012. Der Freitag reported that he later called the start disastrous because it had been unclear how the work was supposed to proceed, and that he then relied on participation; it also credited him, with EnBW sponsorship, for a lamp at the skatepark. On a Südkurier walk through the area he described fitting a used lamp at the skatepark after young people asked for winter light, and said residents still called it the “Pantisano-Laterne”. The paper wrote that he had helped bring the “Grüner Bogen” into being and noted an international lunch at the centre which he said had run for ten years.

From 2011 to 2015 the Bundestag biography lists him as Akademischer Mitarbeiter at the Städtebau-Institut of the University of Stuttgart, overlapping the Konstanz years, and teaching appointments from 2015 to 2024 at that university, the Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart, the University of Konstanz and the HTWG Konstanz. On Abgeordnetenwatch he described the institute work, dated there to 2012–2016, as teaching and research on planning in rural areas, local and regional planning, and migration and the city. The 2020 questionnaire likewise refers to teaching at the HTWG Konstanz and to five years on the institute’s academic staff.

Municipal politics

Stuttgart city council and SÖS

Pantisano entered the Stuttgart city council on 28 April 2016 as the next substitute on the list of the non-party group Stuttgart – ökologisch – sozial (SÖS) from the election of 25 May 2014, succeeding Gangolf Stocker. In the biography he gave the Bundestag he states that he had already been, in 2015–2016, political managing director of the SÖS–Die Linke group. He was returned in 2019, when SÖS took 4.4 percent and three seats—himself, Hannes Rockenbauch and Guntrun Müller-Enßlin—and again in 2024 on the Die Linke list, where 40,824 votes made him the strongest of that list’s three councillors. After election to the Bundestag he resigned with effect from 31 March 2025. On 10 April the council seated Aynur Karlikli of Die Linke in his place, and mayor Frank Nopper gave him the city’s silver commemorative medal for nine years of honorary service.

For 2014–2019 the city’s statistics office recorded a joint faction of SÖS, Die Linke, the Pirate Party Germany and a student list, named SÖS, LINKE, PluS. After 2019 Die Linke, with 5.3 percent and three seats, combined with SÖS, the Pirates and the Animal Protection Party as “Die FrAKTION LINKE SÖS PIRATEN Tierschutzpartei”. SWR has described Pantisano and Rockenbauch as allies in that bloc, and reported that Pantisano joined Die Linke in 2017 while still sitting under the SÖS label until 2024.

Work against racism began before the council seat: in 2005 he initiated “Bunt statt Braun” in Waiblingen, and SWR reported that the town has continued weeks of culture and protest against the far right. His Bundestag biography lists him as initiator, from 2005 to 2015, of a youth culture week against racism in Rems-Murr-Kreis, as a 2013–2014 ambassador of a naturalisation campaign of Baden-Württemberg, and as initiator from 2016 to 2020 of action weeks against racism in Stuttgart.

He opposed Stuttgart 21, the replacement of the surface terminus by an underground through station, arguing that the above-ground Kopfbahnhof was the better concept for the station, rail traffic and the city; he used the slogan “Oben bleiben” (“stay up top”) and often attended the Monday demonstrations around the site. In Stuttgart’s 2020 mayoral election he backed Rockenbauch. Centre-left currents did not unite on one candidate, and in the second round Frank Nopper of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany won.

The 2020 Konstanz mayoral election

In February 2020 Pantisano opened a campaign for mayor (Oberbürgermeister) of Konstanz, where he had been neighbourhood manager in Berchen-Öhmdwiesen for five years. He stood as an independent, backed by the Linke Liste Konstanz and by an alliance of individuals, “Luigi Pantisano für Konstanz”, while employed in the office of Bundestag member Bernd Riexinger of Die Linke. He named housing as the main issue, saying many families spent 30 percent of income on rent, that Konstanz was among Germany’s twenty most expensive cities, and that, unlike incumbent Uli Burchardt, he did not believe building alone would relieve the shortage. He proposed no further sales to investors, municipal land only for the housing company Wobak, cooperatives or building groups, no further Wobak rent rises, repurchase of the Siemens site, and more staff against misuse and vacancy. He called for climate neutrality by 2030 through renovation, climate-neutral new building, keeping open landscape and greening sealed land; the Südkurier noted he gave little further detail. On transport he wanted a car-free centre and interchange points, an idea he shared with Burchardt, from the car to public transport. The paper called their priorities on housing and climate similar, and his the more far-reaching.

In April 2020, in a postal ballot held because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Konstanz branch of Alliance 90/The Greens and the Freie Grüne Liste preferred him to Felix Müller by about 80 percent to 20 percent. They cited what they called his social-ecological profile and hopes for climate neutrality by 2030, better cycling and more affordable housing.

The election, set for 5 July 2020, was postponed because of the pandemic. On 27 September nobody won more than half the valid votes, so the city had to hold a new election, not a runoff limited to the leading two, and new candidates could still enter. Of 66,855 eligible voters, 37,251 voted and 36,999 ballots were valid. Pantisano received 14,177 votes, given by dpa as 38.3 percent; Burchardt of the CDU 13,253 (35.8 percent); Andreas Hennemann of the Social Democratic Party of Germany 5,414 (14.6 percent); Andreas Matt 2,862; Jury Martin 1,232; and other names 61. Der Spiegel and the Süddeutsche Zeitung described Matt as an independent.

On 18 October, 40,912 of 66,618 eligible voters cast ballots and 40,622 were valid: Burchardt received 20,120, Pantisano 18,320, Matt 2,089, Hennemann 49 and others 44. The election committee declared Burchardt elected, and the city published the result on 22 October. Der Spiegel and the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported turnout of 61.4 percent and shares of 49.5, 45.1 and 5.1 percent. Der Spiegel wrote that a Pantisano victory would have made Konstanz the first western German city with a mayor from Die Linke, that the environment had dominated his platform, and that he had publicly kept his distance from the party, which the local CDU attacked. SWR later stated his share as 45.3 percent; the city’s total, and the figure used at the time by Der Spiegel and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, is 18,320 of 40,622 valid votes, or 45.1 percent.

Roles in Die Linke before 2025

Staff work, state office and the federal executive

Pantisano joined Die Linke in 2017 and, in the same year, became a scientific staff member (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) for Bernd Riexinger, a member of the Bundestag who was then a chair of the party. His Bundestag biography, based on his own account, dates that employment from 2017 to 2025.

In 2021 he was deputy state spokesperson (stellvertretender Landessprecher) of the Landesverband in Baden-Württemberg. The federal statute organises the party as one Landesverband in each Land. A state association's organs include at least a state party congress, held as a delegate assembly, and a state executive; its chairs represent it in law. Within the federal programme it adopts a regional programme, and within the federal statute it regulates its own affairs. The federal executive supports the Landesverbände and coordinates their work.

That executive is the Parteivorstand, which the statute calls the party's political leadership organ. It leads the party; decides political, organisational, financial and property questions not reserved to another body; issues statements on current politics; and prepares congresses and meetings of the party council and carries out their decisions. It is generally elected every second year. Current business, within the full board's decisions, lies with a ten-member Geschäftsführender Parteivorstand, including the two chairs, the federal treasurer, the federal managing director and the deputy chairs. Congress elects those officers; the board elects any further members of the smaller executive.

At the congress in Erfurt from 24 to 26 June 2022, delegates cut the Parteivorstand from 44 members to 26 and the deputy chairs from six to four. They returned Janine Wissler as co-chair and elected Martin Schirdewan as the other co-chair. Pantisano was elected on the mixed list of ordinary members, not as chair, deputy chair, treasurer or federal manager. He records his board service as 2022 to 2024. The next congress, in Halle (Saale) from 18 to 20 October 2024, elected a new board, with Ines Schwerdtner and Jan van Aken as chairs; he was not among those elected.

The Movement Left current

The Erfurt vote sat inside currents that had already formed. In April 2018 Der Spiegel reported that a group including the Bundestag member Niema Movassat was meeting in Berlin as a "movement-oriented left" and calling itself the Bewegungslinke. In January it had published an appeal against what it called a "media election club", aimed at plans for a new broad movement or people's party associated with Sahra Wagenknecht, then chair of the Bundestag group, and earlier with Oskar Lafontaine. The group argued that Die Linke was already part of social movements and should concentrate on them. The dispute also concerned refugee policy: Wagenknecht had distanced herself from the party's call for open borders for all, which many in the party treated as an affront, while she sought to win back voters moving to the Alternative for Germany.

Neues Deutschland, reporting the 2022 congress, described the Bewegungslinke as a party working group (Arbeitsgemeinschaft) founded at the end of 2019, and as having emerged in 2018 from the Sozialistische Linke in a quarrel over migration demands linked to Wagenknecht's circle. After the vote the paper counted a larger majority of the 26-member board as aligned with the Bewegungslinke: Wissler, three of the four deputy chairs — Jana Seppelt, Ates Gürpinar and Lorenz Gösta Beutin — and nine of the 18 ordinary members. It placed six ordinary members in what it called the classical reformer camp, which still held senior posts: Katina Schubert as a deputy chair, Schirdewan as co-chair and Harald Wolf as federal treasurer. The Sozialistische Linke, whose activists the paper described as mostly close to Wagenknecht's camp on economic and social policy, won no seats; several of its candidates, including Friederike Benda, withdrew. The labels were contested in the same report. One delegate called the result a "second horseshoe", a tactical alliance of camps, and Tobias Bank, the new federal manager — associated by others with reformers around Bundestag group chair Dietmar Bartsch — said he belonged to no current.

Pantisano was not named in that count. The party's profile of him on the 2022–2024 board did list the Bewegungslinke among his memberships. Later reporting used the affiliation as a political description rather than as an office he held. In 2026 Neues Deutschland wrote that he was anchored in the Bewegungslinke, had worked for the former chair Riexinger, and had taken a sharp position against Wagenknecht during the crisis around her. Die Tageszeitung described him as regarded in the party as a Bewegungslinker, and as someone who had early, clearly and in public opposed what the paper called the "left-conservative" camp around Wagenknecht. On that account, he would have preferred the break with that camp not to have waited until its split from the party in October 2023.

Bundestag mandate

The 2025 election in Stuttgart I

Pantisano stood for Die Linke at the 2025 German federal election as the party's candidate in constituency 258, Stuttgart I, and in second place on its Baden-Württemberg state list. At a state delegate assembly in Leinfelden-Echterdingen on 21 December 2024, state spokesperson Sahra Mirow was placed first with 83.1 percent of the vote, Pantisano second with 75.6 percent, and the sitting member Gökay Akbulut third with 89.5 percent.

The election was held on 23 February 2025. In Stuttgart I, 188,918 people were eligible to vote and 162,105 did so, a turnout of 85.8 percent, 3.7 points higher than in 2021. Of 161,195 valid first votes, Simone Fischer of Alliance 90/The Greens won the direct seat with 45,667 votes (28.3 percent), five ahead of Elisabeth Schick-Ebert of the Christian Democratic Union, who received 45,662 (also 28.3 percent). Die Linke took 14,203 first votes (8.8 percent), a gain of 4.7 points. Its second-vote share was higher: 17,530 of 161,693 valid second votes, or 10.8 percent, up 5.7 points.

Across Baden-Württemberg, Die Linke received 429,484 second votes, 6.8 percent, up 3.5 points on 2021. The Federal Returning Officer recorded six members elected from the state list, in list order from Mirow to Marcel Bauer. Pantisano, born in 1979, is listed as returned for position 2, with constituency 258 given as the district in which he also stood. He did not win that district. The 21st Bundestag held its constitutive sitting on 25 March 2025, and his parliamentary biography records the mandate as a Baden-Württemberg list seat together with the Stuttgart I candidacy.

Committees, rail bodies and the parliamentary group

The Bundestag's Committee on Transport (Verkehrsausschuss) was constituted on 21 May 2025 with 30 ordinary members and 30 deputies. The minutes name Pantisano as one of Die Linke's three ordinary members, alongside Jorrit Bosch and David Schliesing; the group's deputies were Lorenz Gösta Beutin, Bodo Ramelow and Anne Zerr. Tarek Al-Wazir of the Greens was elected chair. The same morning the Committee on the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety was constituted, with Beutin in the chair.

On 24 June 2025 the Die Linke group elected the executive that was to lead it for the legislative term. Heidi Reichinnek and Sören Pellmann became the two chairs, with 94.8 and 72.4 percent. Pantisano was elected, on 70.7 percent, to lead Working Group II, "Housing, Mobility and Climate Protection" (Wohnen, Mobilität und Klimaschutz). The Bundestag reported that the heads of the working groups, together with the spokesperson on women's policy, serve as deputy chairs of the group. The group's page on the Bundestag website still listed him as head of Working Group II in October 2026.

On 15 September 2025 the group proposed him as its member of the advisory council on access to railway infrastructure (Eisenbahninfrastrukturbeirat) at the Federal Network Agency, with Schliesing as alternate. On 18 September the plenary adopted that proposal, Drucksache 21/1681, by a majority of the CDU/CSU, the Greens, the Social Democratic Party and Die Linke; the Alternative for Germany abstained. The council advises the regulator on access to rail infrastructure.

Those two transport assignments changed in September 2026. On 8 September Vinzenz Glaser, returned in fourth place on the same Baden-Württemberg list, announced that he was moving from the Committee on Foreign Affairs to the Committee on Transport and would take the briefs for rail, local public transport, cycling and walking. On 10 September the plenary, on a proposal from Die Linke and without objection, elected Glaser to succeed Pantisano on the railway-infrastructure council, again with Schliesing as personal alternate. By late October 2026 the Bundestag's biographies listed Glaser as an ordinary member of the Committee on Transport, and Pantisano only as a deputy member of that committee and of the environment committee. He remained head of Working Group II.

Policy positions

Housing, cities and public ownership

Pantisano treats housing as part of a demand that basic provision leave the profit economy. In the Deutschlandfunk Interview der Woche of 25 October 2026 he said rent income should maintain the stock and, in cooperatives, build homes, not make money or speculate. He criticised Vonovia for distributing billions while tenants lived in mouldy flats, and added energy, mobility and water. Welt quoted him: “Wir wollen, dass alle Dinge des Gemeinwohls – Energie, Mobilität, Wohnen, Wasser, alle Grundbedürfnisse, die die Menschen in diesem Land haben – vergesellschaftet sind.” He said the Berlin party wanted companies with more than 10,000 flats socialised — about 160,000 homes — while owner-occupied property would be left alone, and he described a rent cap on state-owned housing, 100,000 social homes and a “rent police” against gouging.

The 10,000-flat line is narrower than the 2025 federal programme of Die Linke, which calls affordable housing the central social question and demands a nationwide cap: no rent rises for six years, then hard ceilings, with immediate cuts where markets are tight. It backs Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen and wants companies with more than 3,000 flats moved into a public-law body, with below-market compensation only for small shareholders. Deutschlandfunk reported that 2026 talks in Berlin among Die Linke, the Social Democrats and the Greens had agreed socialisation from 10,000 flats. A referendum on 26 September 2021 had already passed the draft “Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen”, with 1,035,950 yes votes, 57.6 percent of votes cast.

Read against the 2025 programmes, the Berliner Mieterverein recorded a clear spread. Die Linke wanted a temporary nationwide cap that would also cut excessive rents. The Greens proposed, in very tight markets, a regional stop on rises above the local reference rent and a longer Mietpreisbremse. The Social Democrats offered no cap, but an indefinite brake extended to homes first occupied up to 2019 and a 6 percent limit over three years in tight markets. The Christian Democratic Union proposed no such reform and argued that only more, cheaper building would bring rents down. In a ZDF interview on 9 August 2026 he also pointed to empty offices in Stuttgart as future homes. ZDF noted an ifo estimate that only about a third of vacant commercial space converts readily.

Mobility, climate, labour and anti-racism

His most concrete transport demand is Stuttgart 21. On 11 June 2026 he told SWR it was one of the greatest economic-policy scandals in German history and asked for inquiries in the Bundestag and in Baden-Württemberg. He wanted much of the surface track kept, and said the city would need both a deep station and a terminus. On 26 June, Deutsche Bahn chief executive Evelyn Palla confirmed a December 2031 opening and a further €3 billion, a financing frame of €14.5 billion. He then called it “the greatest economic scandal in German history.” A Bundestag inquiry needs a quarter of members; Die Linke held 64 of 630. SWR sums up that older line — keeping the surface terminus — as “Oben bleiben.” The 2025 programme only says the railway is sinking billions in prestige projects such as Stuttgart 21 while more than a third of lines are not electrified.

On 13 November 2025, in the debate on a law to soften rising track-access charges, he said the debt brake was making rail dearer and putting freight and climate targets at risk, and that soon only managers could afford the train. He cited a Deutsche Bahn debt of €32.6 billion in 2024 and called profit-seeking at the railway an illusion. Green speaker Matthias Gastel also wanted lower charges for freight; Stephan Stracke of the Christian Democrats said the coalition was cutting the equity return to 1.9 percent and more than halving a rise he put at 24 percent. The programme links fares and climate the same way: transport still does nothing for climate targets; the nine-euro ticket, then priced at €58, should return, with a zero fare for pupils, trainees, students and pensioners; and new combustion-engine cars should stop being sold on the EU timetable.

His Bundestag biography, which rests on members’ own statements, lists membership of ver.di. In the ZDF interview he said Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government was telling workers that eight hours were not enough, that they should work thirteen hours, and that they should work while ill. ZDF reported that no statute required thirteen-hour days: the coalition agreement looks to a weekly rather than a daily maximum, while the Working Hours Act still limits a day to eight hours, or ten in exceptions. The illness remark, ZDF wrote, compressed plans to end telephone sick notes and require a certificate from the first day. The 2025 programme sets a minimum wage of at least €15, and €16 from 2026.

He folds anti-racism into that social argument. SWR reports that in 2005 he started “Bunt statt Braun” in Waiblingen, that he traces his politics to racism against migrants, refugees and poor people, and that this is where his opposition to Alternative for Germany starts. The same biography lists the Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime – Federation of Antifascists and the Baden-Württemberg refugee council. In October 2026 he told Deutschlandfunk that the party stands with Jewish life, that antisemitic positions have no place in it, and that such statements must be pursued; Welt quoted him adding that antisemitism exists in Die Linke as in every party and must, if necessary, be sanctioned under the statutes.

Federal co-chair

The June 2026 Potsdam congress

On 15 April 2026 Jan van Aken told the executive of Die Linke that he would not seek another term as federal co-chair. He had shared the office with Ines Schwerdtner since October 2024 and had intended to run with her again. A press statement quoted him as saying that health reasons required him to leave the post in June, that the illness was not life-threatening, and that he would keep his Bundestag seat for the rest of the term. The 10th federal congress met from 19 to 21 June 2026 at the Metropolis-Halle in Potsdam. When the pair took office the party had been polling under 3 percent. It returned to the Bundestag in February 2025 with 8.8 percent and by mid-April 2026 was reported at about 10 to 11 percent, with membership above 120,000, more than double the earlier figure.

Luigi Pantisano speaking at the Die Linke federal congress in Potsdam in June 2026.

The leadership ballot was held on Saturday 20 June. Pantisano, then 46, deputy chair of the Bundestag group and its transport spokesperson, had declared his candidacy the day after van Aken’s announcement. The sitting chairs and group leader Heidi Reichinnek backed him, and nobody stood against him. Delegates elected him with 53.3 percent. Schwerdtner was confirmed with 85.7 percent, above the just under 80 percent Der Spiegel reported for her earlier election, when the party’s polling was at a low. Tagesschau reported that about 30 percent voted no, with many abstentions, and called the result narrow and poor beside Schwerdtner’s. Pantisano told tagesthemen that from the following Monday he would work to earn the trust of all members. Those accounts linked the margin to unease, including inside the party, over remarks he had made about the CDU shortly before the vote.

In his candidacy speech he said “I am a socialist” and that he wanted, with the delegates, “to win the working class back for the Left,” speaking of “the real high performers, as opposed to the corporate bosses.” He said he would open the factory gates to the party and organise resistance to Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who in his account spoke daily of reforms while meaning to “fleece” people (abzocken). Van Aken, given a standing ovation, left the aim of a “socialist people’s party” on 20 to 25 percent as a task rather than a dream. Schwerdtner said she would keep fighting cuts planned by the CDU–SPD federal government, “for every social worker in the municipality, for every sports ground and for every child.”

Priorities in office

The congress lead motion, “Die Linke als Steinhaus bauen” (“Building the Left as a house of stone”), put the written weight on the welfare state, rents and prices, pensions and care, and public investment for social relief and industrial change. The executive also tabled an emergency motion on the government’s reform plans, the cuts and planned social protests. On 16 April, the day he said he would run, Pantisano told ARD he would extend the door-to-door canvassing of the previous two years. The issues people raised most, he said, were high rents, the cost of shopping and fear of war, and he wanted membership to grow from more than 120,000 toward 200,000. The congress media pack later listed 126,379 members. He said he had opened a telephone line for employees’ complaints and accused the governing CDU and SPD of having “taken an axe to the welfare state.”

On the night of the election he applied that line to the pension commission. He told tagesthemen he was “angry, like many other people in the country,” that people should not have to work still longer, and that Merz had received from the commission what he had ordered. The party, he said, would take “the resistance onto the street” under the words “Es reicht” (“Enough”).

Housing stayed the demand he put first in office. Tagesschau’s account of his ZDF summer interview on 9 August 2026 said Schwerdtner had already made socialization—expropriation—of large housing companies a condition of any Left role in a Berlin government, and that Pantisano held to it. He treated the 2021 Berlin referendum as a voters’ mandate and called rising rents one of the most pressing problems. As a model he named Vienna, where he said much of the stock is publicly owned and rents are comparatively low, and he added more social housebuilding, stronger public housing companies and the conversion of empty offices. An affordable home, he said, was a basic condition of social security.

In the ARD-Deutschlandtrend published on 1 October 2026, infratest dimap put Die Linke at 11 percent of voting intention, down one point from September, among 1,303 people eligible to vote. The Alternative for Germany stood at 27 percent, the CDU/CSU at 20, the Greens at 16 and the SPD at 13. That was still well short of the 20 to 25 percent van Aken had set as the party’s horizon when he left the chair.

Public controversies

The housing-occupation case

At the end of April 2018, after a demonstration against the housing shortage, two vacant flats at Wilhelm-Raabe-Straße 4 in the Heslach district of Stuttgart were occupied. Neues Deutschland reported it as the city’s first house occupation in 13 years. A family with a small child and a single mother with her son moved in, saying they had found no affordable home, and asked for tenancy contracts.

Pantisano’s conviction concerned a visit, not residence in the house. In 2018 he, fellow city councillor Hannes Rockenbauch and Tom Adler of Die Linke spent about 42 minutes in one occupied flat filming an interview for Rockpolitik.tv. The Kontext weekly reported that two former councillors of the Alternative for Germany complained, that the owners, then living in London, sought a prosecution, and that the state-security police investigated; the flats were cleared in May 2018.

On 30 October 2020 the three admitted unlawful entry (Hausfriedensbruch) before the Amtsgericht Stuttgart. Rockenbauch said the door had been open and that eindringen criminalised them; Adler said the owners wanted solidarity on trial; Pantisano recalled his family’s owner-occupation notice when he was ten — “wir mussten Klinken putzen, weil keiner Italiener haben wollte” — and said law does not operate in a social vacuum. The prosecutor sought 30 daily rates, €80 for Adler, who had an earlier conviction, and €60 each for the others. The court convicted them but imposed less — 15 daily rates of €80 for Adler and ten of €60 each for Pantisano and Rockenbauch — citing the short stay, low criminal energy and lack of damage, and saying that without a conviction they could be expected to repeat the act.

The 2026 remarks on the CDU and the AfD

On Friday 19 June 2026, at Die Linke’s congress in Potsdam, Pantisano told Bild there was “gerade gar keinen Unterschied zwischen der CDU, die faschistische Politik macht, der AfD oder den Faschisten selbst,” and that the party had to keep fascists from power. He called Chancellor Friedrich Merz a failure and “praktisch selbst der unbeliebteste Kanzler seit Jahren.” Bild noted that after autumn elections in the east the Union might need Die Linke for majorities.

Eastern Linke politicians objected the same day. Eva von Angern, lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, told t-online the remark did not match what Pantisano usually said: the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was “eine demokratische Partei,” clearly distinct from the AfD, and Die Linke should stay open to cooperation that would keep the AfD out of office before the election in early September. Hennis Herbst, state chair in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, said parts of the CDU copied AfD policy but that a blanket fascist label shrank the democratic spectrum. Katja Maurer in Thuringia said the CDU could be criticised without relativising the AfD.

With no opposing candidate, Pantisano was elected co-chair on 20 June with 53.3 percent, succeeding Jan van Aken; Ines Schwerdtner was confirmed with just under 86 percent. Der Spiegel reported that he blamed Bild for taking the sentence out of context, repeated the charge after his candidacy speech, then called it unfortunate and shortened. Von Angern later called it unacceptable, and told the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung that equating the CDU with the AfD was absurd. Saxony-Anhalt’s CDU floor leader, Guido Heuer, called the remark an Unding.

On 22 June he told dpa that seeing no current difference between CDU and AfD policy “war verkürzt und in dieser Form falsch.” He apologised, “insbesondere bei denjenigen in der CDU, die immer wieder die Notwendigkeit einer klaren Brandmauer zur AfD betonen,” and said the line between democratic opponents and those who want to abolish democracy must not be blurred. He kept his criticism of the Union’s rightward course and his concern about further CDU–AfD rapprochement.

CDU general secretary Carsten Linnemann rejected the apology in Bild: to say the remark was merely verkürzt was an impertinence; it had been unambiguous, and equating Christian Democrats with fascists trivialised fascist atrocities. The Union’s general secretaries had already demanded Pantisano’s resignation; Martin Huber of the Christian Social Union called the comparison a scandal that mocked the victims of fascism. Daniel Günther, minister-president of Schleswig-Holstein, told Bild that equating the CDU with fascists and the AfD disqualified Pantisano from serious democratic exchange and that he should leave politics as soon as possible.

On 24 June the Bundestag debated the remarks. Linnemann called them “infam, geschichtsvergessen und niederträchtig”; Pantisano attended and did not speak. Schwerdtner said the apology showed stature and called government social policy “politische Gewalt.” Sebastian Fiedler of the Social Democratic Party said the equation helped enemies of the constitution; Irene Mihalic of Alliance 90/The Greens called the apology half-hearted. To AfD interruptions Schwerdtner said its deputies were “die Nachfahren der Verbrecher des Holocaust,” and Vice-President Josephine Ortleb called for order.

In the ARD Interview der Woche, Pantisano said he was sorry the CDU would not accept an apology he called clear and honest. The sentence, and any equation of CDU and AfD, had been wrong, and the subject was closed; the criticism that CDU politicians were taking over AfD policies, he said, remained.