Early beginnings Tillich joined the
Christian Democratic Union (East Germany) in 1987 and became a member of the CDU after
German reunification in 1990. He was a member of the
Volkskammer in 1990. Tillich was delegated as an observer of the
European Parliament between 1991 and 1994. He joined the
European People's Party and was a member of the European Parliament between 1994 and 1999 where he was the Parliament's
rapporteur on the
1998 EU budget.
Career in state politics 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
Sorbian head of government in more than thousand years of Sorbian-German coexistence in
Saxony. Together with
Günther Oettinger,
Dieter Althaus,
Maria Böhmer,
Peter Hintze, Martina Krogmann and
Peter Müller, Tillich co-chaired the CDU’s 2008 national convention in
Stuttgart. In the negotiations to form a
coalition government of the Christian Democrats (CDU together with the Bavarian
CSU) and the
Free Democratic Party (FDP) following the
2009 national elections, Tillich was part of the CDU/CSU delegation in the working group on economic affairs and energy policy, led by
Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg and
Rainer Brüderle. 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. From 2010, Tillich was a member of the Christian Democratic Union's 20-strong executive board. 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
Chancellor Angela Merkel. 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. 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. 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. When the AfD overtook the CDU for the first time to emerge as Saxony's most popular party in the
2017 national elections, Tillich resigned and
Michael Kretschmer took over. In 2017, Tillich said that the "People want Germany to stay Germany,". ==Life after politics==