# Christian Hirte

# Christian Hirte

Christian Hirte (born 23 May 1976 in Bad Salzungen) is a German lawyer and politician of the [Christian Democratic Union](/organizations/christian-democratic-union-of-germany) (CDU). He has been a member of the Bundestag since 2008 and, in the 21st legislative period, sits for the Thuringian state list while standing in the constituency of Eisenach–Wartburgkreis–Unstrut-Hainich-Kreis. The Federal Ministry of Transport lists him as parliamentary state secretary to the federal minister of transport.

He took his Abitur in 1994 at the Staatliches Gymnasium Bad Salzungen and studied law at the University of Jena from 1995 to 2001. From 1999 to 2001 he worked for two members of the Thuringian Landtag, completed his legal clerkship from 2001 to 2003, and from 2004 practised as a lawyer and specialist in tax law (*Fachanwalt für Steuerrecht*) with Muth & Partner. Parliament’s register of members’ interests records that the legal practice has been dormant since 1 May 2025.

Hirte joined the CDU in 1995. He chaired the party in Wartburgkreis from 2010 to 2020, was deputy state chair in Thuringia from 2014 to 2020, state chair from 2020 to 2022, and has again been a deputy state chair since 2022. The CDU candidate carried his constituency with 43.3 percent of the first votes in 2013 and 34.4 percent in 2017. In 2021 [the Alternative](/organizations/the-alternative) for Germany (AfD) won the seat with 24.8 percent. In 2025 AfD candidate Stefan Möller won it with 38.5 percent; Hirte, on 22.7 percent, was the runner-up and returned through the state list.

From March 2018 to February 2020 he was parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy under Peter Altmaier, and in that office the federal government’s commissioner for the new federal states and for small and medium-sized business. On 5 February 2020 the Thuringian Landtag elected Free Democrat [Thomas Kemmerich](/people/thomas-kemmerich) minister-president with votes from the CDU, the FDP and the AfD. Hirte congratulated Kemmerich on Twitter and called him a “candidate of the centre” whose election showed that Thuringians had voted out the red–red–green coalition. On 8 February 2020 he wrote that Chancellor [Angela Merkel](/people/angela-merkel) had told him he could no longer be commissioner for the new states and that, following her suggestion, he had asked to be dismissed. Government spokesman Steffen Seibert confirmed that Merkel, in agreement with Altmaier, had proposed Hirte’s dismissal as parliamentary state secretary to the federal president.

In April 2025 the Thuringian CDU said Hirte would again become a parliamentary state secretary, this time for transport, in the incoming federal government. He holds that post at the transport ministry. The same party biography that records his earlier state chairmanship lists him as a deputy state chair of the Thuringian CDU.

## Early life and education

### Childhood and schooling

Christian Hirte was born on 23 May 1976 in Bad Salzungen, in the west of Thuringia, then part of the German Democratic Republic. His grandparents farmed in the Rhön Mountains, about 50 metres from the fence of the inner German border. The holding lay inside the five-kilometre restricted zone, in front of the 500-metre fence; toward West Germany he could see a second fence, ground kept clear of growth, and helicopters of the Bundesgrenzschutz, which as a child he took for Soviet or East German aircraft. He has called that line "the end of the world," while saying he knew that life continued beyond it.

His grandfather's siblings lived in neighbouring villages on the western side and were visited regularly; the grandparents followed western radio and television, and goods came back from those visits. Hirte has said he already understood that living standards were higher beyond the fence, although his mother told him that people there had the same problems in the end. He was 13 when the border opened in November 1989, and he has recalled the summer of that year and television pictures of tens of thousands of people leaving the GDR. A Roman Catholic, he later said that in an East German school he had been questioned about his faith in front of the class. His mother went on working as a nurse after reunification, and his father, a civil engineer, set up on his own on the day the Deutsche Mark was introduced in the East; Hirte also saw livelihoods around him collapse with the GDR economy.

In 1994 he passed the Abitur at the Staatliches Gymnasium Bad Salzungen. On 6 October 2000 the school was renamed the Staatliches Dr.-Sulzberger-Gymnasium, after the physician and local benefactor Johann Christian Sulzberger. From 1994 to 1995 he performed Zivildienst, the civilian alternative to conscription, as a caregiver in a Diakonie home for elderly people and nursing care in Bad Salzungen.

### University and legal training

From 1995 to 2001 Hirte studied law at the University of Jena, completing the first state examination in law in 2001. From 1997 to 2001 he held a scholarship from the [Konrad Adenauer Foundation](/organizations/konrad-adenauer-foundation) and was spokesperson for its scholarship holders in Jena and Weimar. In the same years he was a student assistant, from 1997 to 1999, to Professor Monika Jachmann at the university's chair of tax law, and from 1999 to 2001 a staff member for two deputies in the Landtag of Thuringia.

From 2001 to 2003 he completed the Referendariat, the practical stage of German legal education between the two state examinations, at the regional court in Meiningen. Stations recorded in his Bundestag biography included the local court and the city administration in Bad Salzungen, the public prosecutor's office in Meiningen, the administrative court in Weimar, the firm Rödl & Partner in Jena, and a placement with the Australian firm Clayton Utz in Sydney. He has been admitted as a lawyer since 2004.

## Legal career

### Practice as a tax lawyer

Hirte completed the Referendariat, Germany's post-university legal traineeship, from 2001 to 2003 at the Landgericht in Meiningen. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament states is based on members' own information, lists him from 2004 to 2026 as a Rechtsanwalt and Fachanwalt für Steuerrecht at Muth & Partner, and the Federal Ministry of Transport's official sketch uses the same description.

The register of interests published with that biography separates two firm entries. The occupation before membership is given as lawyer at Dr. Muth & Partner GbR in Bad Salzungen. The paid activity alongside the mandate is entered at Muth & Partner Wirtschaftsprüfer Steuerberater Rechtsanwälte mbH in Fulda, the legal name of an interdisciplinary practice of auditors, tax advisers and lawyers, and that entry is marked dormant (*ruhend*) from 1 May 2025. Abgeordnetenwatch, which republishes the disclosures, carries the same dormant status, with the record last changed on 11 June 2025. The published biographies do not list his clients or describe particular matters he handled.

Fachanwalt für Steuerrecht is a specialist designation under the Fachanwaltsordnung of the Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer. A regional bar may confer it only when an applicant shows theoretical knowledge and practical experience in tax law substantially beyond ordinary professional training; the prescribed subjects include bookkeeping and annual accounts, general tax procedure, income, corporation and trade tax, value-added tax and real-estate transfer tax, inheritance and gift tax, and the outlines of tax criminal law. The Bundestag entry does not state a separate year for the award; it attaches the title to the Muth & Partner practice dated from 2004.

The same register records one company office among his professional disclosures: membership of the advisory board of Deutsche Rockwool GmbH & Co. KG in Gladbeck until 30 April 2025, at a disclosed 19,040 euros gross a year. Abgeordnetenwatch also lists an accumulated 57,120 euros gross for that role as of 30 September 2024.

### Academic teaching

Hirte's curriculum vitae records a post as Lehrbeauftragter, an external lecturer, in business law (*Wirtschaftsrecht*) at Hochschule Fulda in 2006 and 2007. In March 2018 *Die Tageszeitung* reported that, with his legal state examination behind him, he had joined a partnership headquartered in Fulda and had taught business law at the Hochschule Fulda until 2007, entering the Bundestag the following year. These accounts do not describe any later academic appointment.

## Party and local politics

### Junge Union and the CDU

Christian Hirte joined the Junge Union in Thuringia in 1993 and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1995. From 1999 to 2005 he chaired the Junge Union in the Wartburgkreis. On the state executive he was first deputy chairman from 2003 to 2007. At the state congress in Eisenach in February 2005, when [Mario Voigt](/people/mario-voigt) was elected state chairman, Hirte was returned as first deputy with more than 80 percent of the vote; Stefan Gruhner became second deputy and Falk Eichhorn treasurer. From 2007 he was treasurer of the Thuringian Junge Union, an office still recorded in his Bundestag biography in February 2010. After giving up the district chair he remained an assessor on the Wartburgkreis board for 2005–2007.

In the CDU he had been on the Bad Salzungen executive since 1999 and, from 2006, chairman of the Bad Salzungen–Leimbach city association. He did not stand again when that association chose a new board in early June 2010; the pharmacist Günter van Almsick succeeded him. He was by then district chairman of the CDU Wartburgkreis, a post he held from 2010 to 2020. The association's own account places his election in March 2010. The new executive met on 19 April 2010 and put its membership at 920, calling itself the largest party in the region and the second-largest CDU district association in Thuringia.

Delegates confirmed him on 6 October 2012 at a congress in Oberzella with 97.3 percent, and again on 27 February 2015 in Bad Salzungen with 97.1 percent. On 11 March 2017, in Krauthausen, he received 95.1 percent. At state level, a Thuringian party congress in Frankenblick on 13 December 2014 made him one of three equal-ranking deputy state chairmen, with Birgit Diezel and Mario Voigt, when Mike Mohring was elected state chairman. He held the deputy state chair until 2020. The district chairmanship ended on 17 October 2020, when the CDU associations of the Wartburgkreis and Eisenach merged at a congress in Creuzburg. Michael Brodführer, mayor of Bad Liebenstein, was elected chairman of the joint association with 98.6 percent; Raymond Walk, previously chairman in Eisenach, became a deputy.

### Municipal council and the business wing

Hirte sat on Bad Salzungen city council from 2004. On 1 February 2009 he moved his main residence to Tiefenort, then a separate municipality, and resigned the city-council mandate, which contemporary reporting attributed to the Thuringian municipal code. Manfred Lesser took the seat, and mayor Klaus Bohl thanked Hirte for his work for the town. The official Bundestag handbook lists him as a member of the Tiefenort municipal council from 2009 to 2014 and of the Wartburgkreis council (Kreistag) from 2009 to 2019 and again from 2021.

The same early biography places him, from 2005, on the Thuringian CDU's specialist committee for the economy, technology and labour, and from 2004 to 2008 on the party's joint party court. His organized link to business ran through the Mittelstands- und Wirtschaftsvereinigung (MIT), the CDU/CSU association for small and medium-sized firms. He joined in 2005 and was treasurer of the Eisenach–Wartburgkreis branch in 2005–06. On 26 April 2006 the branch elected him chairman after Christian Nielsen left the CDU; the statutes required the chair to belong to the parent party. More than 70 percent of the branch's members were not party members. Members confirmed him unanimously on 20 November 2008. He said the branch should keep speaking for smaller firms affected by the financial crisis, including suppliers dependent on Opel, and noted his seat in the Bundestag's parliamentary Mittelstand circle. In June 2010 he did not stand again, having taken the CDU district chair that March; the outgoing executive proposed the freight forwarder Andree Heinemann of Oberellen as successor.

## Member of the Bundestag

### Entry and constituency

Christian Hirte entered the Bundestag on 15 May 2008, during the 16th legislative period, as successor to Bernward Müller. Müller, a Christian Democratic Union (CDU) member from Gera, resigned his mandate on 9 May 2008 to become minister of education and cultural affairs of Thuringia; the Bundestag's data handbook records Hirte as the member who took the seat six days later. The CDU/CSU parliamentary group dates his membership from that day.

His constituency is the western Thuringian district covering the city of Eisenach, the Wartburgkreis and the Unstrut-Hainich-Kreis. At the 2009 and 2013 Bundestag elections it was constituency 190, under the official name Eisenach – Wartburgkreis – Unstrut-Hainich-Kreis II. In 2017 and 2021 the Federal Returning Officer still numbered it 190, but without the Roman numeral, as Eisenach – Wartburgkreis – Unstrut-Hainich-Kreis. For the 2025 election it was renumbered constituency 189, the number shown over that area on the state election office's map. The eligible electorate was 192,663 in 2013, 222,558 in 2017 and 201,183 in 2025.

### Committees and group offices

In the 17th Bundestag his archived biography, current as of March 2010, lists him as a full member of the Committee on Tourism and of the Committee on the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, and as a deputy member of the Defence Committee and the Election Scrutiny Committee. In the 18th term (2013–2017) he moved to the Budget Committee and its Audit Committee. He was also a full member, and the CDU/CSU Obmann, of that term's 4th committee of inquiry, which the Bundestag charged with examining Cum/Ex transactions in which capital-gains tax was refunded or credited more than once although it had been paid only once. He was also a deputy member of the Finance Committee and of several bodies on electoral scrutiny, immunity, procedure and sustainable development.

For the 19th Bundestag the archived biography records him as deputy chair, and a full member, of the Committee on Building, Housing, Urban Development and Local Government, as a full member of the Committee on the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, and as a deputy member of the Committee on Transport and Digital Infrastructure. From March 2018 to February 2020 he was parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy; that appointment, and his later transport post, are covered elsewhere. In the 20th term (2021–2025) he was a full member of the Committee on the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection, a deputy member of the Committee on Housing, Urban Development, Building and Municipalities and of the Joint Committee, and a full member of the Mediation Committee. The CDU/CSU group lists him as chair of its Thuringia Landesgruppe, the circle of its members from the state.

### Elections from 2009 to 2025

At the 2009 election a preliminary count drawn from the Thuringian statistical office named Hirte as the CDU candidate in constituency 190 with 34.8 percent of first votes. The Federal Returning Officer's final table gave the CDU 44,903 first votes, also 34.8 percent, ahead of [Die Linke](/organizations/die-linke) on 27.6 percent and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) on 22.6 percent, with turnout at 65.0 percent, and recorded the CDU as the party of the winning constituency candidate. His 17th-term Bundestag biography lists him as directly elected in Thuringia.

He held the direct mandate at the next two elections. In 2013 the CDU won constituency 190 with 43.3 percent of first votes, 8.5 points above 2009, and Die Linke was second on 23.7 percent; the biography for the 18th term records him as directly elected in that district. In 2017 the CDU's first-vote share fell to 34.4 percent, 9.0 points lower than in 2013, but remained ahead of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) on 21.2 percent; turnout was 73.3 percent, and the 19th-term biography again records a direct mandate.

On 12 June 2021 a CDU delegate assembly in Erfurt placed him first on the Thuringia state list, with 66 of 94 votes and three abstentions and no opposing candidate; the party described the result as 72.5 percent. At the 2021 election the AfD won constituency 190 with 24.8 percent of first votes, the SPD was second on 23.8 percent, and the CDU fell to 23.0 percent, down 11.4 points. Hirte nevertheless returned for the 20th Bundestag through the Thuringia state list. In renumbered constituency 189 in 2025, Stefan Möller of the AfD won the direct seat with 38.5 percent of first votes and Hirte was runner-up on 22.7 percent, the same CDU share as in 2021; turnout was 79.5 percent, and on second votes the AfD took 40.4 percent to the CDU's 19.7 percent. He again entered on the state list, the basis the Bundestag gives for his 21st-term mandate, with constituency 189 as his candidacy.

## Economic affairs and the new federal states

### Parliamentary state secretary

On 14 March 2018, when Angela Merkel's fourth federal government was formed, Christian Hirte was listed as a parliamentary state secretary to the federal minister for economic affairs and energy, Peter Altmaier. The Chancellery published that list on 16 March in the Bundesanzeiger, with the organisational decree and the cabinet roster of the day the government took office. The CDU deputy from Thuringia sat in the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. From March 2018 he was also commissioner for the new federal states, the Ostbeauftragter, succeeding Iris Gleicke, and commissioner for the Mittelstand. He told MDR that Merkel had offered him the eastern brief, which Gleicke had held since 2014. Even in the 28th year of German reunification, he said, the east still needed its own function in the federal government. He called himself "the lobbyist for the 16 million citizens in the new federal states," citing a largely rural settlement pattern and a much smaller-scale economy than in the west. His Bundestag biography records the state secretaryship and both commissioner roles as lasting from March 2018 until February 2020.

### Commissioner for eastern Germany and small business

The office's regular public product was the federal government's annual report on the state of German unity, which the economics ministry sends to the Bundestag under a resolution of 28 May 2009. The 2018 report, transmitted on 26 September 2018 as printed paper 19/4560, put gross domestic product per inhabitant in eastern Germany in 2017 at 73.2 percent of the western level. Unemployment averaged 7.6 percent in the east in 2017, against 5.3 percent in the west. Collectively agreed wages had reached 98 percent of the western level and wages actually paid 82 percent; about 80 percent of funding under the joint task for regional economic structure still went to the east.

The 2019 report, forwarded on 25 September 2019 as printed paper 19/13500, measured the new Länder including Berlin. On that definition, GDP per inhabitant was 74.7 percent of the western level in 2018, 0.6 percentage points above the previous year, and real output grew by 1.6 percent against 1.4 percent in the west. The text again traced the productivity gap to lower settlement density, small firms, missing corporate headquarters and faster ageing after the emigration of the 1990s. Hirte told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that the east was "much better than its reputation." He called it "completely wrong" to blame the Treuhandanstalt for present problems, and a distortion of history when Die Linke and the Alternative for Germany traced them to exploitation by the west after 1990. Many easterners, he added, still felt like second-class citizens.

Party disputes over how he used the brief began well before he left it. In a Welt interview soon after his appointment he said it was "humanly understandable" if, from fear of change, people first met the unfamiliar with rejection, linking that to rare everyday contact with foreigners in East Germany. He also called the AfD in part a right-wing extremist party and ruled out cooperation with it as it then stood, naming Björn Höcke in Thuringia. On 10 February 2019 [Manuela Schwesig](/people/manuela-schwesig), an SPD deputy chair, accused him of misusing the office after he said in the *Thüringer Allgemeine* that it did not help "only to lament that the east Germans have come up short and that more money must therefore be distributed," and that labour minister Hubertus Heil's basic-pension plans were unacceptable as then proposed. Schwesig answered that equal living conditions had not been reached and that a basic pension would particularly help eastern pensioners; Thuringia's SPD leader Wolfgang Tiefensee called the remarks an attack on the coalition.

In August 2019, before Landtag elections in Saxony and Brandenburg, Hirte told *Business Insider* that the [Party of Democratic Socialism](/organizations/party-of-democratic-socialism) had cast itself as a systemic opposition after reunification and had questioned parliamentary government and the social market economy for years. "One could say that the PDS-Left sowed socially what the AfD is harvesting today," he said, arguing that protest had moved right once Die Linke, whose [Bodo Ramelow](/people/bodo-ramelow) was Thuringia's minister-president, had entered government. Katja Kipping, then co-chair of Die Linke, demanded his resignation, calling him "at best a caricature of an eastern commissioner." After the Thuringian election of 27 October 2019, in which Die Linke was the largest party and the outgoing Left–SPD–Green coalition could not continue, he told the RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland that the CDU's lead candidate, Mike Mohring, should stand for minister-president because the party had campaigned with a candidate. With no majority, he said, bills would have to be settled case by case; a coalition with, or toleration by, the Left or the AfD remained ruled out.

## Dismissal and the 2020 Thuringia crisis

### The Kemmerich election

The Landtag election in Thuringia on 27 October 2019 left no majority. Die Linke won 31.0 percent and 29 of 90 seats, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) 23.4 percent and 22, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) 21.7 percent and 21, the Social Democratic Party 8.2 percent and eight, Alliance 90/[The Greens](/organizations/the-greens) 5.2 percent and five, and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) 5.0 percent and five, with turnout at 64.9 percent. Minister-president Bodo Ramelow of the Left had only 42 deputies with the SPD and the Greens, short of the 46 required for an absolute majority, and the CDU under Mike Mohring excluded cooperation with both the Left and the AfD, whose Thuringian branch was led by Björn Höcke. Ramelow nevertheless sought to continue red-red-green as a minority government.

*Thomas Kemmerich in the Thuringian Landtag in Erfurt on 5 February 2020, the day he was elected minister-president.*

On 5 February 2020 the Landtag in Erfurt voted for a minister-president. The first two ballots, which needed an absolute majority, gave Ramelow 43 and then 44 votes and the AfD’s candidate, the non-party local politician Christoph Kindervater, 25 and then 22. In the third ballot a plurality sufficed, and the FDP nominated its parliamentary leader, Thomas Kemmerich. He received 45 of 90 votes to Ramelow’s 44, with none for Kindervater and one abstention, and accepted the office. The ballot was secret, but Kindervater’s zero meant the plurality depended on AfD votes as well as those of the FDP and CDU deputies — the first time in the Federal Republic that AfD votes had been decisive in such an election.

Kemmerich said he was “anti-AfD, anti-Höcke” and that a firewall would hold; Mohring said the CDU was not responsible for other parties’ votes. FDP leader Christian Lindner called him the candidate of [the centre](/organizations/the-centre) and the AfD’s support tactical, and denied a prior arrangement. CDU chair [Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer](/people/annegret-kramp-karrenbauer) said the state party had acted against the national leadership’s will. [The Left](/organizations/the-left-slovenia)’s state chair, Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, threw a bouquet at Kemmerich’s feet and refused his handshake.

Hirte, parliamentary state secretary in the economics ministry, commissioner for the new federal states and deputy Thuringian CDU chair, tweeted the same day: “Herzlichen Glückwunsch, Thomas Kemmerich. Deine Wahl als Kandidat der Mitte zeigt noch einmal, dass die Thüringer Rot-Rot-Grün abgewählt haben” (“Congratulations, Thomas Kemmerich. Your election as a candidate of the centre shows once again that the Thuringians have voted out red-red-green”). On 6 February, at a press appearance in Pretoria, Chancellor Angela Merkel called the election a unique and “unverzeihlich” (“unforgivable”) breach of the conviction, hers and the CDU’s, that majorities must not be won with the AfD. The result had to be reversed, she said, the CDU must not join a Kemmerich government, and it had been “a bad day for democracy.”

### Removal from office and reactions

SPD co-chair [Saskia Esken](/people/saskia-esken) said that calling the CDU–FDP–AfD combination the “centre” meant Hirte could no longer speak for the SPD or the federal government. The German Trade Union Confederation cancelled an invitation for an October event, and Green Bundestag member Sven Kindler rebuked the tweet. On the morning of 8 February Hirte wrote that Merkel had told him he could no longer be commissioner for the new Länder and that, at her suggestion, he had asked to be dismissed. Spokesman Steffen Seibert said the chancellor, with Economics Minister Peter Altmaier’s agreement, had proposed to Federal President [Frank-Walter Steinmeier](/people/frank-walter-steinmeier) his dismissal as parliamentary state secretary under section 4, sentence 2, of the Parliamentary State Secretaries Act. He left the ministry and the eastern-Germany post but remained a Bundestag member. *n-tv*, citing CDU sources, reported that he had been asked to delete the tweet and had refused.

Kemmerich, who had said on 6 February that he would step down, resigned with immediate effect on 8 February and said he would return the pay of the office. The coalition committee called the election unforgivable and urged a new minister-president and an early state election. Mohring had already offered to give up the Landtag group chair; on 14 February he said he would not stand again as state party chair so the Thuringian CDU could be rebuilt.

Esken said Hirte could not have stayed, and Thuringia’s SPD chair, Wolfgang Tiefensee, called the step inevitable and overdue but warned against making him the CDU’s only consequence. SPD parliamentary leader [Rolf Mützenich](/people/rolf-mutzenich) called the tweet a breach of the democratic consensus; Left leader [Dietmar Bartsch](/people/dietmar-bartsch) said anyone who congratulated Kemmerich “did not pay attention in history class.” Green co-chair Robert Habeck said the CDU had still not said whether it would tolerate Ramelow. Thuringian CDU general secretary Raymond Walk regretted the dismissal, while AfD co-chair Tino Chrupalla called it “DDR methods” and Werteunion chair Alexander Mitsch accused Merkel of the motto “punish one, educate a hundred.”

In a *Spiegel* interview that March, Hirte said he did not believe “the congratulations as such” had been the problem, even for the chancellor: the tweet “stands for itself,” and he had not deleted it. The difficulty, he said, was the overall circumstances, not that CDU deputies chose “the candidate of the bourgeois centre,” and he had not expected so quick a resignation. He said a chancellor may dismiss a state secretary who has become a burden, and that he bore Merkel no grudge. On 15 June 2022 the Federal [Constitutional Court](/organizations/constitutional-court) held that Merkel’s Pretoria remarks, made in office and published on official websites, violated the AfD’s right to equal opportunity under Article 21 of the Basic Law.

## Leadership of the Thuringian CDU

### Election as state chair

The state chairmanship of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Thuringia fell vacant when Mike Mohring resigned in March 2020 after the February government crisis. Hirte, a deputy state chair and member of the Bundestag, then led the Land association on an acting basis. A full election of the state executive, planned for the spring, was postponed because of the [COVID-19 pandemic](/drivers/covid-19-pandemic).

On 19 September 2020 a state party congress in Erfurt elected him chair. He had no opposing candidate and received 67.6 percent of the delegates' votes, also reported as just under 68 percent. Hirte said he would work to convince those who had not voted for him. Reporting at the time described him as a compromise candidate, supported among others by former minister-presidents Bernhard Vogel and Dieter Althaus. The congress left open who would lead the CDU into a possible early Landtag election. Hirte called that a second step and said that he, Landtag group chair Mario Voigt and Raymond Walk would each consider standing.

In his candidacy speech he called for the party to show that it was acting together again, and he ruled out cooperation with the Alternative for Germany and with Die Linke. The congress elected Walk, Beate Meißner and Thadäus König as deputy chairs and Christian Herrgott as general secretary. Of those contests, only Meißner's was opposed: Marion Walsmann stood against her.

### The 2021 campaign and the handover

Hirte was the Thuringian CDU's lead candidate for the [2021 German federal election](/facts/2021-german-federal-election). At a delegates' meeting in Erfurt on 12 June 2021 he was placed first on the Land list with 66 of 94 votes and three abstentions, recorded by the CDU as 72.5 percent. He had no opponent. The share was above his 67.6 percent for the chair but, on the figures the party gave, among the weaker results on that Bundestag list. He said the CDU wanted, as in 2017, to win all eight constituencies in Thuringia. Voigt, named as the intended lead candidate for an early Landtag election, said the aim was to end the government of Die Linke, the SPD and the Greens.

That Landtag election was not held. An early vote had been rescheduled for 26 September 2021, the day of the federal election, but it required the Landtag to dissolve itself by a two-thirds majority. Four CDU deputies said they saw no sufficient reason to do so. On 16 July 2021 the Left's parliamentary leader, Steffen Dittes, withdrew his signature from the dissolution motion, which then no longer had the 30 signatures required, so there was no Thuringia election on 26 September. Voigt said Die Linke had denied voters that chance. In the federal election the CDU in Thuringia received 16.9 percent of the second votes, 11.9 points below its 2017 share, behind the AfD on 24.0 percent and the SPD on 23.4 percent.

Hirte left the chair after two years. On 17 September 2022 a congress at the Schützenhaus in Pößneck elected Voigt, already chair of the Landtag group and without an opponent, with 85.2 percent of the votes cast. He said the result gave him momentum. Holding both the party and the parliamentary leadership, he was treated in the CDU as the likely lead candidate for the 2024 Landtag election, with the aim of returning to government after ten years in opposition. A statute change raised the number of deputy chairs from three to four. Hirte was elected one of them with 70.4 percent, alongside Thadäus König (82.4 percent), Beate Meißner (71.1 percent) and Raymond Walk (80.2 percent). Herrgott was confirmed as general secretary with 89.0 percent. The Bundestag biography lists Hirte as Thuringian CDU chair from 2020 to 2022 and again as deputy chair from 2022.

## Transport ministry and later parliamentary work

### State group and committees, 2021–2025

In the 20th Bundestag, from 2021 to 2025, Hirte sat for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on the state list of Thuringia. The archived parliamentary biography gives his constituency as constituency 190, Eisenach – Wartburgkreis – Unstrut-Hainich-Kreis, and records that the seat came through the state list rather than a direct mandate.

He was a full member of the Committee on the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection and a deputy member of the Committee on Housing, Urban Development, Building and Municipalities. The same Bundestag record lists him as a deputy member of the Joint Committee and as a full member of the Mediation Committee, the body in which the Bundestag and the Bundesrat seek agreement on contested legislation.

The joint CDU/[Christian Social Union](/organizations/christian-social-union-in-bavaria) parliamentary group lists him as chairman of its Thuringia state group (Landesgruppe). He already held that position when the group met after the 2025 federal election: a regional report of 28 February 2025 said that, at its first meeting after the election, the group had again elected him chairman on the preceding Tuesday. The CDU in Thuringia states that in the 21st Bundestag the Landesgruppe has four members and that Hirte chairs it. The same February report named [Diana Herbstreuth](/people/diana-herbstreuth), [David Gregosz](/people/david-gregosz) and [Michael Hose](/people/michael-hose) as the new Thuringian CDU members of the Bundestag and noted that Antje Tillmann and Manfred Grund had not stood again, so that the party had gained one seat in the state. Hirte said the CDU, as the strongest force in Germany, had a mandate to govern and could again be a voice for Thuringia in Berlin, and he called the results in the east a warning that migration, security, the economy and energy had to be dealt with.

On 8 January 2025 a CDU delegate assembly in Erfurt placed him first on the state list, with 74 of 86 votes cast. A party congress in Ilmenau the previous December had proposed him unanimously as lead candidate. State chairman and minister-president Mario Voigt described him as an economic expert in the Bundestag for eastern Germany; second place went to Diana Herbstreuth, an officer in the Bundeswehr.

The election to the 21st Bundestag was held on 23 February 2025. In the renumbered constituency 189, covering Eisenach, the Wartburgkreis and the Unstrut-Hainich-Kreis, the Federal Returning Officer’s final count gave Stefan Möller of the Alternative for Germany 61,095 first votes (38.5 percent) and Hirte 35,936 (22.7 percent). Turnout was 79.5 percent of 201,183 eligible voters. Hirte did not win the constituency. The current Bundestag biography states that he returned on the Thuringia state list, while remaining the candidate in constituency 189.

### Parliamentary state secretary for transport

On 28 April 2025 the Deutsche Presse-Agentur, in a dispatch carried by the *Süddeutsche Zeitung*, reported that, according to the CDU, Hirte was to become parliamentary state secretary for transport in the new federal government. Andreas Bühl, chair of the CDU group in the Thuringian Landtag, said he expected an impulse for transport projects in the state, including expansion of the Mitte-Deutschland rail link and reactivation of interrupted lines such as the Höllentalbahn between Blankenstein and Hof and the Werratalbahn between Schleusingen and Coburg.

*Christian Hirte at the Grumbachtalbrücke construction site in St. Ingbert in 2026.*

The *Thüringer Allgemeine* reported the next day that [Friedrich Merz](/people/friedrich-merz), then chancellor-designate, had telephoned Hirte, who was still in Rome, the day before Merz presented his personnel in Berlin, and that Hirte was to take the transport post. The Federal Chancellery’s notice of the government formed on 6 May 2025, published in the *Bundesanzeiger* on 12 May, names Patrick Schnieder as Federal Minister for Transport and lists Hirte together with Ulrich Lange as the parliamentary state secretaries to that minister. The chancellor’s organisational decree of the same day renamed the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport the Federal Ministry for Transport.

The Bundestag records his function as parliamentary state secretary for transport. His published notice of outside activities states that his work as a lawyer with Muth & Partner in Fulda has been dormant since 1 May 2025. The ministry’s own profile describes him as parliamentary state secretary to the federal minister of transport and dates the office from 2025. It does not publish a separate division of subjects between him and Lange.

With effect from 29 July 2026, [Steffen Bilger](/people/steffen-bilger) succeeded Schnieder as federal minister of transport. In its account of the handover, the ministry said that Hirte and Lange would continue to support the minister as parliamentary state secretaries. On 11 August 2026 Hirte visited the Grumbachtalbrücke site on the A6 at St. Ingbert with mayor Ulli Meyer. The city reported that [the bridge](/organizations/the-bridge) was being replaced in stages by two new structures, and that during the visit Hirte signed St. Ingbert’s Golden Book.

## Political positions

### Economy, energy and infrastructure

As federal commissioner for the new states, Christian Hirte of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur in June 2018 that the commission on growth, structural change and employment should first assure Lusatia and the Central German lignite district they would not be forgotten, for instance through research institutes and new firms, and only then consider coal, rather than shutting every lignite plant by a set date and asking afterwards how the regions would continue. In January 2019 he said federal aid would run for decades because leaving coal could not happen overnight, a lesson from earlier breaks in the new states and in coal and steel.

In the 2025 Bundestag campaign the *Thüringer Allgemeine* reported that he called a coal exit by 2030 utopian and giving up nuclear power wrong, and that lower emissions, smaller cars, more ecological living or less flying should show in people's wallets, and the reverse as well.

In the Bundestag on 5 December 2024, on a CDU/CSU motion against banning the climate-neutral combustion engine, he said such vehicles could be run in a climate-friendly way with renewable fuels. The Union, he said, wanted technology openness, including renewable fuels, advanced biofuels and e-fuels, and he said the [European People's Party](/organizations/european-people-s-party) group would the next day call for the [European Commission](/organizations/european-commission) to evaluate, within its first 100 days, the ban on new combustion-engine cars from 2035.

In May 2018 he told the *Mitteldeutsche Zeitung* that a Daimler headquarters in Halle was unrealistic and that the east should "tend the small plants": more firms per 100,000 inhabitants than the old states, helped with innovation, research and internationalisation until Mittelstand success stories reached western levels.

### Eastern Germany, democracy and social policy

In August 2019, before state elections in Saxony and Brandenburg, he told SWR, as reported by *[Der Spiegel](/organizations/der-spiegel)*, that the CDU had not taken up the public mood or shown that it had people's interests in view. He named migration, mobility and climate policy as subjects on which many people in the east, especially in the countryside, had not felt looked after, and he described the east as more rural and small-scale, without large international employers. Of the [2019 European Parliament election](/facts/2019-european-parliament-election-in-germany), he said one could hardly claim the party had got its politics right.

On 5 February 2020, after the Landtag of Thuringia elected Thomas Kemmerich of the Free Democratic Party minister-president with CDU, FDP and [Alternative for Germany](/organizations/alternative-for-germany) (AfD) votes, Hirte congratulated him on Twitter as a "candidate of the centre" whose election showed that Thuringians had voted out red-red-green. The next month he told *Der Spiegel* that the congratulations had not been the problem, including for Chancellor Angela Merkel, that he had nothing to retract and had not deleted the tweet, and that the fault lay in the circumstances, not in choosing the "bourgeois centre" over candidates of the AfD, The Left or the FDP. He said a Christian Democrat was at first glad a Left minister-president had been voted out, and that he had wanted the CDU to field its own candidate.

On 19 September 2020 he told the Thuringian CDU congress that the party had "nichts am Hut" — nothing in common — with Björn Höcke's AfD, which he said pursued a völkisch-racist politics, and that The Left, which he identified with Susanne Hennig-Wellsow rather than minister-president Bodo Ramelow, wanted a change of system. On 12 June 2021 in Erfurt he called that AfD a völkisch party observed as right-wing extremist by the Thuringian domestic-intelligence service, described votes for it as "lost votes for democracy", and said nobody would cooperate with it. In February 2025 the *Thüringer Allgemeine* reported him calling the AfD unacceptable, "including its lies", and saying a more conservative CDU was right so that differences inside the [democratic centre](/organizations/democratic-centre) were clearer. Migration, he said, must not split society, because "we have quite different problems"; the paper also reported that he favoured a year of compulsory social service and regarded defence spending as indispensable.

On 30 June 2017 he voted against opening [marriage to same-sex couples](/facts/same-sex-marriage-in-germany). The bill passed by 393 votes to 226, with four abstentions; he was among the CDU/CSU members voting no and, with Matern von Marschall, filed a written explanation. He rejected the amendment of section 1353 of the Civil Code, called the procedure a breach of the coalition agreement by the Social Democratic Party, and wrote that registered partnerships were already legally equal in nearly every field. Marriage, he argued, was by wording and tradition only the lasting union of a man and a woman, specially protected under the Basic Law as he read it and as he said the Federal Constitutional Court had treated it; children could be cared for in same-sex partnerships, but that still differed from marriage because a child required a third person.

## Personal life

### Family and religion

Christian Hirte was born on 23 May 1976 in Bad Salzungen, then in the German Democratic Republic. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament states is based on members' own statements, records that he is Roman Catholic, married and the father of three children, and does not name his spouse or children.

### Civic offices

The Bundestag register of interests, published under the members' code of conduct, lists several offices in associations and foundations. It names Hirte as a member of the foundation council of the Point Alpha Stiftung in Geisa. Founded on 1 January 2008, with capital from the federal government, Hesse, Thuringia and local authorities, it maintains the Point Alpha memorial as a place of remembrance of German division and of research and education on the Cold War. The site preserves a former United States observation post on the inner German border in the Fulda Gap.

The register also names him president of Kuratorium Deutsche Einheit e.V., based in Geisa. The non-profit association awards the Point Alpha Prize, of 25,000 euros, for service to German and European unity; its members choose the recipient, and the Point Alpha Foundation organises the ceremony. It was first presented in 2005 at the former post to [George H. W. Bush](/people/george-h-w-bush), Mikhail Gorbachev and [Helmut Kohl](/people/helmut-kohl).

He is listed as a member of the board of Gegen Vergessen – Für Demokratie e.V. in Bonn. Founded in 1993 after racist and xenophobic attacks, it links remembrance of the crimes of Nazi Germany and of injustice under the Socialist Unity Party of Germany with work for democracy and against extremism, and reports more than 2,300 members in about 40 regional groups.

Further seats in the register are on three foundation councils. The Bundesstiftung Baukultur in Potsdam, a public-law foundation created by a statute of 17 December 2006, is charged with promoting the quality and sustainability of planning and building in Germany and awareness of the built environment. The Bundesstiftung Bauakademie, established on 24 January 2019 on a Bundestag decision, works on planning, building and urban development and is to operate a Bauakademie on the site of Karl Friedrich Schinkel's building in Berlin-Mitte. The Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss, founded in 2009, states that it is client and operator of the Humboldt Forum in the reconstructed Berlin Palace; its council is the foundation's highest body and includes members sent by the Bundestag.

Until 5 May 2025 the register listed him as first chairman of the Indo-German Association for Legal Cooperation, with its seat given as Frankfurt am Main. It states that it was launched in Berlin in November 2017 as a forum for lawyers, politicians and business figures from India and Germany.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/christian-hirte