Sevim Dağdelen

German politician

Sevim Dağdelen (born 4 September 1975) is a German politician and a member of the Bundestag. She was elected for Left Party (die Linke) and switched in October 2023 to Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht.

Born in Duisburg to Kurdish immigrants of Alevi faith from Erzincan, Sevim Dağdelen finished high school in 1997. She studied law first at the University of Marburg and then at the University of Adelaide, Australia for a year. Although later attended the University of Cologne, she did not complete her law studies and dropped out to pursue her political career. She worked for the leftist Turkish newspaper Evrensel and German publications Tatsachen and Junge Stimme and has continuing memberships in the worker unions.

After joining the Left Party, Dağdelen became a member of the regional level party council of North Rhine Westphalia and the federal student agency from 1996 to 1998. From 1993 to 2001, she was a member of the federal youth commission. Since 2005, she has been a member of the German Bundestag. Dağdelen participated in the State dinner with Angela Merkel at the White House in June 2011. Dağdelen visited Julian Assange at the Embassy of Ecuador in the United Kingdom in September 2012, passing on to him "solidarity from the left in Germany and the online community in Germany". She was reelected into the Bundestag for the fifth time following the 2021 German federal election. She is known to be a supporter of the Kurdish People's Protections Units (YPG) as she showed the flag of the YPG in the Bundestag which in Germany is forbidden. She also opposes the German foreign policy regarding Turkey, which attacked the YPG in Afrin. Her appearance at a regional IG Metall congress in 2018 lead to a controversy, as Turks made a social media campaign to end their membership in the workers union. On the a press conference on 23 October 2023 the Sahra Wagenknecht presented her new party BSW. Sevim Dağdelen is one of the MPs who left The Left and joined Wagenknecht's party. This was announced that day.

In February 2022, Dağdelen said Russia has no interest in an invasion of Ukraine and was concerned with its legitimate security interests. She also called for a neutral status for Ukraine. On 18 February 2022, she appeared at a demonstration in Berlin with the slogan "Security for Russia is security for our country," where she accused the German media of spreading the "tall tales of the U. S. intelligence service". After the Russian invasion occurred, Dağdelen was among the co signers of a statement attributing significant responsibility for the Russian invasion to the United States. In April 2022, she praised German protesters who opposed an increase in German military spending, and she described it as "madness" to deliver military weapons to Ukraine. Dağdelen criticized European Union commission president Ursula von der Leyen's speech in early 2023 that called for a new EU policy towards China, saying that "[t]he EU and its member states want to challenge the emerging power China, including through military means."