Born in Elsterwerda, Brandenburg, Lutze grew up in Leipzig. In 1986, he completed his general secondary schooling, and three years later he completed his vocational training as a mechanical engineer in a foundry in Leipzig, which was linked to his A-levels. He then worked there as a repair fitter. In 1990 and 1991, he worked as an assembly fitter at a temporary employment agency. From 1991 to 1995 he studied design and production engineering at the University of Saarland. From 1995 to 2002, he was a regional office employee of the PDS parliamentary group in Saarbrücken. From 2003 to 2005, he retrained as an office administrator in a Saarbrücken furniture store. From 2005, he was a constituency employee of Oskar Lafontaine in Saarlouis. He became member of the bundestag after the 2009 German federal election.^[2] He is a member of the Committee for Economics and Energy.^[3] In his group he is spokesman for economic policy.^[4]

In March 2021, Lutze became part of a political scandal.^[5] Since September 2022 he is no longer the leader of The Left in the state of Saarland. He has been succeeded by Barbara Spaniol.^[6]

In October 2023, Lutze resigned his membership from the Left Party and instead joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD), citing that "he no longer perceived the Left as a 'corrective' of socially undesirable developments". Lutze retained his seat in the Bundestag, but was rejected from the Saarland SPD, and instead was accepted into the Berlin SPD, specifically the Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain chapter.^[7]

• Official website (in German)
• Bundestag biography (in English)