Winfried Kretschmann

Kretschmann was born at Spaichingen in Baden-Württemberg. His parents were expellees from the mostly Roman Catholic region of Ermland (East Prussia) after World War II. He grew up on the rural Swabian Alb (southern Baden-Württemberg). Kretschmann attended a Catholic boarding school in Sigmaringen and passed his Abitur in Riedlingen. Following his military service, he studied to be a teacher of biology and chemistry (later ethics) at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, graduating in 1977. ==Political career==

Early beginnings From 1973 to 1975 Kretschmann was active in the Communist League of West Germany. He later denounced this orientation towards the revolutionary positions of the German student movement as a "political misapprehension"; today he is more ecologically oriented and counted among the members of the more conservative wing of the Greens. After three years as a school teacher at Sigmaringen, Kretschmann went into politics. He is one of the founding members of the Baden-Württemberg section of the German Green Party (at Sindelfingen on 30 September 1979). In 1980, Kretschmann was for the first time elected into the Landtag, the state parliament, and a first stint of his chairmanship of his party's parliamentary group followed from 1983 to 1985. In 1985 he left Stuttgart to work in Hessen at the ministry of environment, then run by party colleague Joschka Fischer for two years. In 1988, Kretschmann returned to Baden-Württemberg, being re-elected into the Landtag in 1988. He lost his seat in 1992, but returned – after four years back as a teacher – in 1996 and held his seat in 2001 and 2006. In 2002, he was again elected chairman of his party's parliamentary group. Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg, 2011–present In the 2011 state elections, amid a surge in support for the anti-nuclear Greens following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan, a coalition government of Greens and Social Democrats won over the former predominating conservative CDU; Kretschmann was elected as the new state Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg. He ran on a platform that called for shutting down nuclear power plants, overhauling a public school system the Greens see as elitist, and imposing speed limits on Autobahns. Also, Kretschmann is widely regarded as having benefited from his party's opposition to Stuttgart 21, a massive development project in Baden-Württemberg's capital. Kretschmann's election ended 58 years of uninterrupted rule in Baden-Württemberg by the Christian Democratic Union party. Turkey (2012), Japan (2013), South Korea (2013), Israel (2013), the United States (2015, 2018, 2022) and China (2015). When German Chancellor Angela Merkel held preliminary talks to sound out possible common ground with the Green Party in an attempt to form a coalition government following the 2013 elections, Kretschmann was part of the Greens’ delegation. In the 2016 state elections, Kretschmann led the Green Party to a historic 30%, thus coming three points ahead of the Christian Democrats. For the first time in any German regional election, the Greens emerged the strongest single party in the state. Kretschmann was confirmed as leader of a coalition government of Greens and Christian Democrats in May 2016. In July 2020, Kretschmann-led government of Baden-Württemberg banned full-face coverings burqas, niqabs for all school children. The rule will apply to primary and secondary education. Kretschmann said that full-face veiling did not belong in a free society. Following the ongoing success of the Greens in the 2021 state elections, Kretschmann was subsequently re-elected for serving a third term as minister president on 12 May 2021. ==Political positions==

Kretschmann belongs to the more Realpolitik-oriented, centrist wing of the Green Party, and has been characterised as holding economically liberal, pro-business views. He identifies as a green conservative. His business-friendly approach to policy has caused him to clash with his party on more than one occasion. While he shared his party's official position of favoring an alliance with the SPD after the 2013 federal elections, he repeatedly criticized its campaign. When Bavaria filed a lawsuit in the Federal Constitutional Court in 2012, asking the judges to back their call for an overhaul of the German system of financial transfers from wealthier states (such as Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg) to the country's weaker economies, Kretschmann decided that his state would not back the lawsuit and instead urged reform via negotiations between all the states. Kretschmann has in the past been vocal about climate change policies. In May 2015, he joined Governor Jerry Brown of California and other international leaders from various states and provinces in signing the Under2 MOU, a non-binding climate change agreement in Sacramento, California. At the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, Kretschmann and Brown convened in Paris during the talks to attract more supporters among governors, mayors and other leaders of “subnational” governments for stronger commitments to reducing emissions. During the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, Kretschmann clashed with environmentalists, as he supported stimulus subsidies for the purchase of cars with relatively efficient combustion engines. Kretschmann stated that he wants to keep refugees who commit crimes in groups away from major cities and distribute them in the country, saying that the idea of sending some of them "into the pampas" was "not wrong", and adding, "To put it bluntly, the most dangerous thing that human evolution has produced is hordes of young men." He claimed that the 2018 Freiburg gang rape was a "terrible example" of this. ==Other activities==

• Central Committee of German Catholics, Member • Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Freiburg, Member of the Council • Academy of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, Member of the Board of Trustees • Deutsches Museum, Ex-Officio Member of the Board of Trustees ==Honours==

• 2023 Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany ==Personal life==

Kretschmann is a Catholic. He is married with Gerlinde, has three children (including Johannes) and lives in Sigmaringen. ==See also==