Born in Neudörfel (Sorbian: Nowa Wjeska) near Kamenz (Sorbian: Kamjenc), Tillich studied construction and drive techniques at the Dresden University of Technology after finishing his Abitur at the SorbianGymnasium in Bautzen in 1977. He graduated from university with a Diplomingenieur degree in 1984. Tillich was an employee of the district administration of Kamenz between 1987 and 1989. Later he became an entrepreneur.
Tillich was a minister in the government of Saxony from 1999. He was State Minister for Federal and European Affairs until 2002 when he became State Minister and head of the Staatskanzlei. In 2004 he was first elected a member of the Landtag of Saxony and became the Saxon State Minister for Environment and Agriculture. He became State Minister of Finance in 2007.
Minister-President of Saxony, 2008-2017
Tillich was proposed by Georg Milbradt on 14 April 2008 to become his successor as the Minister-President of Saxony. The Landtag of Saxony elected him on 28 May 2008. He is the first Sorbianhead of government in more than thousand years of Sorbian-German coexistence in Saxony.
In 2010, news media reported that Michael Kretschmer, the CDU’s general secretary in Saxony, had offered personal meetings with Tillich in exchange for party donations worth €500 to €8,000, or about $680 to $10,900.[3]
From 2010, Tillich was a member of the Christian Democratic Union's 20-strong executive board.[4] By 2012, opinion polls put the backing of Tillich's CDU at 44 percent, at the time the highest level of support in any of the 16 German federal states; this made commentators describe him as “Germany’s second most-powerful politician from the formerly Communist East“ after ChancellorAngela Merkel.[5]
Tillich participated in the exploratory talks between the CDU, CSU and SPD parties to form a coalition government under Merkel following the 2013 federal elections.[6]
Tillich won reelection in the 2014 state elections. Ahead of the elections, he had soon put an end to speculation that he might team up with the newly founded AfD, which the CDU instead attempted to characterize as a fringe movement that flirts with the far right.[7] At the time, Saxony was the first of three eastern regions to hold elections in a two-week span, with Brandenburg and Thuringia later rounding off the first set of electoral since Merkel won a third term.
As one of Saxony's representatives at the Bundesrat, Tillich served as chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs from October 2016. In addition, he was a member of the German-Russian Friendship Group set up in cooperation with Russia's Federation Council.
In 2017, Tillich said that the "People want Germany to stay Germany,".[9][10]
Life after politics
From 2018 until 2019, Tillich co-chaired the German government's so-called coal commission, which was tasked to develop a masterplan before the end of the year on how to phase-out coal and create a new economic perspective for the country's coal-mining regions.[11]
Besides his native language Upper Sorbian, Tillich speaks fluent German, Czech and Polish. His wife, Veronika, is half-Polish, half-Sorbian. Her father was a forced laborer from Poland who settled in Lusatia after World War II and married a Sorbian woman.
Tillich and his wife have two children.[citation needed]
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