Saskia Esken

Saskia Christina Esken (née Hofer; born 28 August 1961) is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who served as co-leader of the party from her election in December 2019 (alongside Norbert Walter-Borjans) and re-election in December 2021 (alongside Lars Klingbeil) until 2025. She has been a member of the Bundestag since 2013 and has worked in the IT sector for less than four years in the early 1990s.

Esken was born 1961 in Stuttgart. She graduated from the Johannes Kepler Gymnasium in Weil der Stadt in 1980 or 1981 She was the first in her family to attend university, but dropped out of the University of Stuttgart after four semesters of German studies and politics. From then on, Esken toured southern Germany as a street musician with her guitar, slept in her car, waited tables in pubs and delivered parcels, was a chauffeur and typist at the University of Stuttgart. She also worked as a production assistant. Esken completed her dual training as a state-certified computer scientist at the vocational college for computer science at the Akademie für Datenverarbeitung Böblingen (Böblingen Academy for Data Processing) in 1990. On the other hand, she writes that she completed this in 1991. She worked in software development until she ended her professional career after the birth of her first child in 1994. In 1994, 1996 and 1999, Esken and her husband Roland Esken became parents to Jana, Lena and Sebastian. She came to education policy via the voluntary parents' association and was deputy chair of the Baden-Württemberg state parents' council from 2012 to 2014. According to a report by the ARD magazine "Kontraste", the newly composed board of directors at the time dismissed the office manager after her email account was searched without consent. In response to an extensive "Kontraste" inquiry to Esken about the matter, the SPD stated that it would not comment on labor law issues.

Esken joined SPD in 1990, when she lived in Calw, a small town in the black forest region. From 2008 to 2015 she was the chairwoman of the Bad Liebenzell local association, and from 2010 to 2020 she was the chairwoman of the Calw district association.

Esken has been a member of the German Bundestag since the 2013 elections, representing Calw. In parliament, she served on the Committee on Internal Affairs (2018–2019), the Committee on the Digital Agenda (2013–2019), the Committee on Education, Research and Technology Assessment (2013–2017) and the Parliamentary Advisory Board on Sustainable Development (2013–2017). In this capacity, she was her parliamentary group's rapporteur on privacy, IT security, digital education, and eGovernment.

Within her parliamentary group, Esken was part of working groups on digital issues (since 2014) and on consumer protection (since 2018) as well as of the Parlamentarische Linke (Parliamentary Left), an association of left-wing MPs.

In the negotiations to form a coalition government under the leadership of Chancellor Angela Merkel following the 2017 federal elections, Esken was part of the working group on digital policy, led Helge Braun, Dorothee Bär, and Lars Klingbeil.

Together with Norbert Walter-Borjans, Esken announced her candidacy for the 2019 Social Democratic Party of Germany leadership election. During her campaign, she vowed to force Chancellor Merkel and her CDU/CSU bloc to renegotiate the coalition treaty or push for an “orderly retreat” from the government. Esken and Walter-Borjans won the November 2019 run-off against Klara Geywitz and Olaf Scholz.

Shortly after, both Esken and Walter-Borjans stepped back from their threat to pull out of Merkel’s government and instead signed off on a “compromise”, calling for measures including a “massive” investment program and a minimum wage of 12 euros per hour. At the time, this was widely interpreted as a move designed to mend relations between leftwing and centrist factions in the SPD.