Katja Isabel Leikert (née Rüb, born 3 March 1975) is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)[1][2] who has been serving as a member of the Bundestag (Germany's national parliament) since 2013, representing the Hanau electoral district.

[3] Leikert was born at Neustadt an der Weinstraße, a mid-sized town on the edge of the Pfälzerwald, roughly half an hour to the southwest of Ludwigshafen.

After that she took what in some ways amounted to a gap year, working as a teaching assistant at the Duke of York's Royal Military School in Dover, England.

[5] Her dissertation was supervised by Jürgen Wilzewski[6] and concerned United States security policy in respect of Iran and North Korea; it has subsequently been commercially published.

[11] Parliamentary colleagues elected her one of the CDU/CSU alliance's eleven Bundestag deputy chairpersons in January 2018, first under the leadership of Volker Kauder and later Ralph Brinkhaus.

[14] In addition to her committee assignments, Leikert has been an alternate member of the German delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) since 2022.

[20][21] Ahead of the 2021 national elections, Leikert endorsed Armin Laschet as the Christian Democrats' joint candidate to succeed Merkel as chancellor.