A Conversation with the Minister-President of the Free State of Thuringia Bodo Ramelow
Next month, state elections will be held in the three eastern German states of Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia. Coming off of the European parliamentary elections in early June, when the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won most of the votes in all five eastern German states, poor polling numbers for the parties making up the governing coalition at the federal level, and the development of a new party, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenkecht (BSW), there are lots of questions about how people will vote.
Support for the AfD in the former communist eastern German states was much higher than the national average of 15.9 percent and gave the party enough of a boost to make it the second strongest party in Germany after the Christian Democrats. Exit polls showed that the majority of AfD voters were concerned about their economic well-being and irregular migration.
Join the American Council on Germany and the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung New York Office for a virtual discussion with the Minister-President of the Free State of Thuringia, Bodo Ramelow, about the trends in eastern Germany before voters take to the polls in three states. The discussion will take place in German with simultaneous translation into English.
Bodo Ramelow is a German politician who has served as the Minister-President of the Free State of Thuringia since March 4, 2020. He previously held this office from 2014 until February 5, 2020. In this capacity, he has also been a member of the Bundesrat, and served as its President for one year from November 1, 2021 until October 31, 2022. Mr. Ramelow is a member of the Left Party and previously chaired his party’s group in the Thuringian state assembly (Landtag).
Mr. Ramelow was born and raised in West Germany. He trained as a retail salesman and became an official in the Gewerkschaft Handel, Banken und Versicherungen (HBV), the union for trade, bank, and insurance employees, during the 1980s. He moved to the eastern German state of Thuringia after German unification and joined the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). He was elected to the Landtag in 1999 and became Deputy Chairman and then, in 2001, Chairman of the party’s parliamentary group in the state parliament.
In February 2004, Mr. Ramelow was elected top candidate of the PDS in the Thuringian state elections, and was re-elected as the Chairman of the PDS in Thuringia. Starting in June 2005, Mr. Ramelow was chief negotiator during unification talks which ultimately led to the creation of a new party, Die Linke (The Left). From 2005 to 2009, he was a Member of the German Bundestag and Deputy Chairman of the Die Linke parliamentary group, and from 2009 to 2014, he served as the Chairman of the Die Linke state parliamentary group in Thuringia. Following elections in September 2014, Mr. Ramelow was elected by the Landtag as the Minister-President of the Free State of Thuringia – with the support of the Social Democratic Party and the Greens, which had joined Die Linke in a coalition. This vote marked the first time Die Linke had won the leadership of any of Germany’s states since German unification in 1990.
