forward as an alternative to the regional minister president Matthias Platzeck of the centre-left Social Democratic Party. The party's share of the vote increased to 28%, ranking a strong second to the Social Democratics. It was the best result the PDS had achieved in Brandenburg since reunification and the restoration in 1990 of Brandenburg as a state with its own regional legislature. However, it was not enough to overturn the governing coalition. As a result of the 2007 merger between the PDS and the (much smaller, but briefly influential) WASG movement, Dagmar Enkelmann became a member of the party now branded simply as Die Linke ("The Left"). National parliament and regional parliament At a time when her youngest child was still a young baby, Enkelmann came to national politics through active participation in the Round table movement. Between March and October 1990 she was a member of East Germany's first - and as matters turned out last - freely elected national parliament ("Volkskammer"). She became co-leader (with Bernd Meier) of the PDS group in the chamber, and one of two PDS party members elected by party colleagues to the chambers' Präsidium. Reunification took place formally in October 1990, at which point the East German Volkskammer and the West German Bundestag were effectively merged. In order to respect demographic fairness, only 143 members of the 400 seat East German chamber retained seats in the combined assembly. Dagmar Enkelmann was one of these, however. She was re-elected to the Bundestag, representing the Brandenburg electoral district, later in 1990, and again in 1994, leaving the Bundestag in 1998, still aged only 42. She told an interviewer that "eight years in such an exposed position" had been enough, although she never expressly ruled out a return to national politics. Between September 1999 and October 2005 she was a member of the Brandenburg regional parliament ("Landtag"), serving till 2004 as a member of the regional party executive, spokesperson on environment and energy policy and a member of the committee for agriculture, environmental protection and planning. During 2004/2005 Dagmar Enkelmann was the leader of the PDS group in the Brandenburger Landtag. At the 2005 general election Dagmar Enkelmann returned to the National Parliament ("Bundestag"). She served as Parliamentary Party Manager ("Chief Whip") for Die Linke between 2005 and 2013. In order to avoid the distortions arising in wholly constituency based systems, the German electoral system allocates