Bodo Ramelow (The Left Party) was elected Vice-President of the German Bundestag on 25 March 2025, where he represents the constituency of Erfurt – Weimar – Weimarer Land II as a Member of Parliament. As Vice-President, he is committed to media diversity, the fight against hate and incitement, platform regulation and the ethical use of artificial intelligence. He previously served as a Member of Parliament for Thuringia in the Bundestag from 2005 to 2009.
Bodo Ramelow was born on 16 February 1956 in Osterholz-Scharmbeck. From 1970 to 1973 he completed vocational training to become a retail clerk in Gießen, obtained his entrance qualification for universities of applied sciences in 1977 and was a branch manager in Marburg from 1978 to 1980. In the 1980s he was a trade union secretary in Middle Hesse, and chairman of the Thuringian branch of the Union of Workers in Commerce, Banking and Insurance (HBV) from 1990 to 1999. In 1999 he joined the PDS, which would later be renamed The Left Party.
From 2005 until 2009, Bodo Ramelow was deputy chairman of The Left Party parliamentary group in the Bundestag. Prior to this, from 1999 until 2005, he was a Member of the Thuringian Land Parliament, to which he returned from 2009 until 2015. In 2014 he became Minister-President of the Free State of Thuringia, and remained in office until 2024. From November 2021 to October 2022, he was President of the Bundesrat, the chamber representing Germany's Länder at federal level.
In September 2025, he published the book "Die neue Mauer. Ein Gespräch über den Osten" (The New Wall: A Conversation about the East) together with historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk.