From to , she served as that party's parliamentary co-chair. After the foundation of The Left in , she was a leading member of one of the party's most left-wing factions as leader of the Communist Platform. She has been a controversial figure throughout her career due to her hardline and populist stances, statements about East Germany , immigration and refugees, and her political movement Aufstehen.
She is not a member of any parliamentary committee. Wagenknecht was born on 16 July in the East German city of Jena. Her father disappeared in Iran when she was a child. She was cared for primarily by her grandparents until , when she and her mother moved to East Berlin. From , Wagenknecht studied philosophy and modern German literature as an undergraduate in Jena and Berlin, completing the mandatory coursework, but did not write a thesis as she "could not find support for her research aims at the East Berlin Humboldt University".
She then enrolled as a philosophy student at the University of Groningen , completing her studies and earning an MA in for a thesis on the young Karl Marx 's interpretation of Hegel , supervised by Hans Heinz Holz and published as a book in Following the controversy, she announced that she would not run for the post.
Wagenknecht successfully contested a seat in the federal election in North Rhine-Westphalia. On 15 May , she was at last elected vice president of the Left Party with Early in , the German press reported that Wagenknecht was one of 27 Left Party Bundestag members whose writings and speeches were being collected and analyzed by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
She has been one of the main driving forces in the formation of Aufstehen , a left-wing political movement established in , which exists outside of traditional political party structures and has been compared to the French movement La France Insoumise. She complained that the involvement of political parties at its heart had "walled in" the movement. She would nonetheless continue to make public appearances on its behalf. Wagenknecht was elected co-leader of the Left's Bundestag group in alongside Dietmar Bartsch succeeding long-time leader Gregor Gysi.
