28 Leaders of political parties in Germany

Lothar Bisky was a German politician. He was the chairman of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor of East Germany's Socialist Unity Party (SED). In June 2007 he became co-chairman of The Left party, formed by a merger of the PDS and the much smaller Labour and Social Justice – The Electoral Alternative. From 2007 until 2010 he was the President of the Party of the European Left. Also, he was the Publisher of the socialist newspaper Neues Deutschland.

Heinrich Aloysius Maria Elisabeth Brüning was a German Centre Party politician and academic, who served as the chancellor of Germany during the Weimar Republic from 1930 to 1932.

Reinhard Hans Bütikofer is a German politician who has been serving as a member of the European Parliament since 2009. He is a member of the Alliance 90/The Greens, part of the European Green Party. He was the co-chair of Alliance 90/The Greens (alongside Claudia Roth from 2002 to 2008 and of the European Green Party from 2012 to 2019.

Günter Deckert is a German far-right political activist. He was the leader of the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD). He has served five years in prison in Germany for various offences, including Holocaust denial and incitement to racial hatred. He translated the Leuchter report, an investigation he commissioned from an American Holocaust denier which attempted to cast doubt on the feasibility of mass extermination via the gas chambers in the Holocaust.

Gerhard Michael Frey was a German publisher, businessman and politician. He was the chairman and main financial backer of the right-wing party Deutsche Volksunion, which he founded in 1971. He resigned as chairman in January 2009.

Eberhardt Alexander Gauland is a German politician, journalist and lawyer who has served as leader of the right-wing political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the Bundestag since September 2017 and co-leader of the party from December 2017 to November 2019. He has been a Member of the Bundestag (MdB) since September 2017. Gauland was the party's co-founder and was its federal spokesman from 2017 to 2019 and the party leader for the state of Brandenburg from 2013 to 2017.

Johann Baptist Gradl, was a German politician and member of the Christian Democratic Union.

Dirk Hillbrecht is a software developer and a former leader of the Pirate Party Germany.

Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then assuming the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934. During his dictatorship, he initiated World War II in Europe by invading Poland on 1 September 1939. He was closely involved in military operations throughout the war and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust, the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims.

Erwin Huber is a German politician. He was chairman of the Christian Social Union of Bavaria from 2007 to 2008.

Alfred Ernst Christian Alexander Hugenberg was an influential German businessman and politician. An important figure in nationalist politics in Germany for the first few decades of the twentieth century, Hugenberg became the country's leading media proprietor during the interwar period. As leader of the German National People's Party he was instrumental in helping Adolf Hitler become Chancellor of Germany and served in his first cabinet in 1933, hoping to control Hitler and use him as his "tool." Those plans backfired, and by the end of 1933 Hugenberg had been pushed to the sidelines. Although Hugenberg continued to serve as a "guest" member of the Reichstag until 1945, he wielded no political influence.

Oskar Lafontaine is a German politician. He served as Minister-President of the state of Saarland from 1985 to 1998, and was federal leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) from 1995 to 1999. He was the lead candidate for the SPD in the 1990 German federal election, but lost by a wide margin. He served as Minister of Finance under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder after the SPD's victory in the 1998 federal election, but resigned from both the ministry and Bundestag less than six months later, positioning himself as a popular opponent of Schröder's policies in the tabloid press.

Christof Leng is a German computer scientist and politician. As a founding member of the Pirate Party Germany, he became its first leader on 10 September 2006 and held the post until May 2007.

Bernd Lucke is a German economist and politician. Lucke was elected a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in 2014. He failed to win reelection in 2019.

Angela Dorothea Merkel MdB is a German politician serving as the chancellor of Germany since 2005. She served as the leader of the Opposition from 2002 to 2005 and as the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) from 2000 to 2018. A member of the CDU, Merkel is the first female chancellor of Germany. During her tenure as Chancellor, Merkel has been frequently referred to as the de facto leader of the European Union and the most powerful woman in the world.

Jörg Hubert Meuthen is a German economist serving as Federal spokesman for Alternative for Germany (AfD) since July 2015. He was frontrunner for the AfD at the 2016 Baden-Württemberg state election and has been a Member of Parliament and parliamentary leader since March 2016. Since the end of 2017, Meuthen has been a member of the European Parliament and deputy chairman of the EFDD. He was the leading candidate of the AfD for the 2019 European Parliament election.

Sebastian Matthias Nerz is a German politician and bioinformatician who was the leader of the Pirate Party Germany from May 2011 to April 2012. He left the Pirate Party Germany in February 2014.

Frauke Petry is a German politician who chaired the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party from 4 July 2015 to 29 September 2017. A chemist by training and with a professional background as a businesswoman, some political scientists described Petry as a representative of the national conservative wing of that party.

Matthias Platzeck is a German politician. He was Minister President of Brandenburg from 2002 to 2013 and party chairman of the SPD from November 2005 to April 2006.

Walter Scheel was a German politician. A member of the Free Democratic Party of Germany (FDP), he first served in government as the minister of Economic Cooperation and Development from 1961 to 1966. He led the FDP from 1968 to 1974.

John Schehr was a German political activist who became a Communist Party politician and ultimately, chairman (leader) of the party, following the arrest on 3 March 1933 of Ernst Thälmann. By this time the country was very rapidly being transformed into a one-party dictatorship, meaning that the party John Schehr led was outlawed, with those members of the leadership team who had not escaped abroad now living "underground" (unregistered) and in hiding. Schehr was nevertheless arrested on 13 November 1933 and taken to a Berlin concentration camp. He died when he was one of four men shot by Gestapo officials, reportedly "while escaping" during an overnight transport, following arrest.

Jürgen Schmieder is a politician, originally from East Germany, who came to prominence during the months immediately preceding German reunification.

Franz Xaver Schönhuber was a German right-wing extremist journalist, politician, and author. He gained fame as a founder and eventual chairman of the right-wing German party The Republicans.

Jens Peter Seipenbusch is a German politician and physicist who was leader of the Pirate Party Germany.

Edmund Rüdiger Stoiber is a German politician who served as the 16th Minister President of the state of Bavaria between 1993 and 2007 and chairman of the Christian Social Union (CSU) between 1999 and 2007. In 2002, he ran for the office of Chancellor of Germany in the federal election, but in one of the narrowest elections in German history lost against Gerhard Schröder. On 18 January 2007, he announced his decision to step down from the posts of minister-president and party chairman by 30 September, after having been under fire in his own party for weeks.

Adolf von Thadden was a German far-right politician. Born into a leading Pomeranian landowning family, he was the half-brother of Elisabeth von Thadden, a prominent critic of the Nazis who was executed by the Nazi government in September 1944.

Udo Voigt is a German politician and former Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the far-right and Neo-Nazi party National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) between 2014 and 2019. He was a member of the European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. He served as leader of NPD from 1996 to 2011. By profession, he is a former captain in the German Air Force and has a master's degree in political science from LMU. Voigt has in recent years become a strong supporter of Vladimir Putin and has said that Germany should have "a chancellor like Putin."

Alice Elisabeth Weidel is a German politician and has been the leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the Bundestag since October 2017. She has been a member of the Bundestag (MdB) since the 2017 federal election during which she was the AfD's lead candidate together with Alexander Gauland. Since November 2019, she has been the deputy federal spokeswoman for her party and, since February 2020, chairwoman of the AfD state association in Baden-Württemberg.