2024-08-23 15:10:14
At the beginning of the year, the Left Party assumed that Katja Wolf would move into Eisenach City Hall again. But now everything is completely different.
In February, Katja Wolf dropped a bombshell: she would leave the Left Party, she announced in Eisenach, where she had been mayor since 2012. It later became clear that Wolf did not want to move back into the town hall. Today she is the leading candidate of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) for the state elections in Thuringia. Before that, she had declared: “I would not join any of Sahra Wagenknecht’s parties.”
Party founder Wagenknecht was quick to praise her new top candidate highly. Wolf stands for “competence in local politics and citizen-oriented politics.” However, criticism came from the Left Party: Wolf had always signaled to her party that she wanted to run for mayor for the Left Party again in the local elections in May, explained Philipp Pommer, the chairman of the Left Party in Eisenach. The election program was ready. Today he can no longer look her in the eye.
Video | The BSW: a pro & con
Profession: Mayor of Eisenach until 30 June 2024, previously member of the state parliament in Thuringia
Birthday: March 7, 1976
Place of birth: Erfurt (Thuringia)
Marital status: married, two children
Vocational training: studied social education
Wolf says she joined the BSW to weaken the AfD. During her time as mayor, she made headlines when she refused to shake hands with NPD city councilors when they were sworn in. A court ruled this was illegal – but Wolf did not shake hands with NPD members even after her re-election.
Wolf now considers her former party to be too intellectual, academic and urban to stand up to the AfD. Regarding Wagenknecht’s warnings about immigrants, she told the “Tagesspiegel” newspaper in the spring: “She was an early warning voice and was immediately put in a right-wing corner. I didn’t understand that because I didn’t perceive her warnings as right-wing.”
In her eyes, Putin is an “unacceptable aggressor,” but one cannot “supply weapons until the last Russian is dead.” In climate policy, she wants to focus on renewable energies. She considers coalitions with the Left or the CDU to be conceivable, but cooperation with the AfD to be impossible.
Katja Wolf’s career has been on a steep upward trajectory so far: in 1999, at the age of 23, she was elected to the Thuringian state parliament. For the Left Party, she was chairwoman of the Equal Opportunities Committee and spokesperson for environmental policy.
In 2012, Katja Wolf was elected mayor of Eisenach in the runoff election with 51.6 percent of the vote. In 2018, she defended the office, which she held until June 2024. In February 2024, she left the Left Party and joined the BSW.
Katja Wolf is married and has two children and an older sister. Her mother was a teacher, her father a foreman.