Thomas Silberhorn

Thomas Silberhorn (born 12 November 1968 in Kemmern, in the district of Bamberg) is a German lawyer and politician of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU). He has been a member of the Bundestag since 17 October 2002, sitting in the 15th through 21st electoral terms, and, in the 21st term, holds the direct mandate for constituency 235, Bamberg, in Upper Franconia. In the 2025 federal election the Federal Returning Officer recorded him as elected with 39.4 percent of the first votes (61,044), ahead of Alternative for Germany candidate Michael Adam Weiß on 18.7 percent (28,891). Turnout in the constituency was 85.8 percent, and the CSU took 37.0 percent of the second votes.

Silberhorn studied law from 1987 to 1992 in Erlangen, Munich and Bayreuth and passed the first state examination in law in 1992. His legal traineeship, from 1992 to 1994, was served in Bamberg, Bayreuth, Paris and Brussels, and in 1993–94 he was a research assistant in public law, with an emphasis on European law, at the University of Bamberg. He passed the second state examination in 1994 and worked until 2000 as a research assistant in public international and European law at the University of Bayreuth. The Bundestag lists his profession as Rechtsanwalt (attorney). In the same official biography, which publishes members' own particulars, he is described as Catholic, married and the father of two sons.

He has been a member of the Bamberg district council since 2002 and, since 2005, deputy chairman of the CSU association for Upper Franconia. From 2009 to 2013 he was the CDU/CSU group's Obmann (coordinator) on the Bundestag committee for legal affairs, and in 2014 a deputy chair of the group for interior policy, justice and consumer protection. In February 2014 the CSU named him to succeed Christian Schmidt as parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development after Schmidt was chosen as federal minister of agriculture, and the Bundestag records him in that office from 2014 to 2018. In March 2018 Der Spiegel reported that Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen was bringing Silberhorn and the CDU politician Peter Tauber into the Federal Ministry of Defence as parliamentary state secretaries. On 17 July 2019 Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer reappointed both men, and the Bundestag records Silberhorn in the defence post through 2021.

From 2021 to 2025 he was the CDU/CSU group's spokesperson for transatlantic relations, and since 2025 he has been the group's Justiziar. In the 21st Bundestag he is a full member of the interior committee and of the committee on election scrutiny, immunity and the rules of procedure. He is a deputy member of the committees on European Union affairs, legal affairs and consumer protection, foreign affairs and defence, of the subcommittee on crisis prevention, strategic foresight, stabilisation and peacebuilding, and of the Wahlausschuss. On 21 May 2025 the Bundestag elected him, on the CDU/CSU nomination, as a member kraft Wahl of the Richterwahlausschuss for the judges of the supreme federal courts. He is a member of the board of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly and a deputy member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.

Early life and education

Childhood in Upper Franconia

Thomas Silberhorn was born on 12 November 1968 in Kemmern, a municipality in the district of Bamberg in Upper Franconia, Bavaria. The municipality places itself about seven kilometres north of the city of Bamberg, on the river Main at the foot of the Haßberge.

The Bundestag biography, which the parliament says rests on members' own information, records that he is Catholic. It does not name his parents or otherwise describe his childhood household. He passed the Abitur, the qualification for university entrance, in Bamberg in 1987.

He has referred to Bamberg as his home town in those years. In an account published on 24 June 2014 in Der Tagesspiegel and reprinted by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, he said that he had founded a youth orchestra there and had been active in Catholic youth work. He also said that, when he applied for a study grant, he was already a member of the Junge Union, the youth organisation of the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union, but was not particularly active in it. A report of 7 September 2010 from the Archdiocese of Bamberg, marking forty years of the Katholische Junge Gemeinde, described Catholic youth work as having shaped both Silberhorn and the Landtag member Eduard Nöth, and stated that both had come into politics through it.

University and legal training

From 1987 to 1992 Silberhorn studied law in Erlangen, Munich and Bayreuth. He did so as a scholarship holder of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. In the same 2014 account he said the affiliation was largely a matter of timing: he had applied both there and to the CSU-aligned Hanns Seidel Foundation, both invited him to a selection interview, and he accepted the Adenauer Foundation because it answered first. He said his main motive had been the money, which let him concentrate on the degree, and that the grant's chief value was contact with students of other subjects and years. He described it as having the function of a handrail for the course of study—"Each person has to walk alone." He passed the first state examination in law in 1992.

From 1992 to 1994 he was a Rechtsreferendar, the trainee stage between the two state examinations, with stations in Bamberg, Bayreuth, Paris and Brussels. In 1993–1994, while still a trainee, he was a research associate at the chair of public law with a European-law emphasis at the University of Bamberg. He passed the second state examination in 1994.

From 1994 to 2000 he was a research assistant at the chair of public law, especially public international law and European law, at the University of Bayreuth. He was admitted as a lawyer (Rechtsanwalt) in 2001. Before he became a member of the Bundestag, the parliament's disclosure of members' interests listed legal work for him at the firm of Prof. Schweizer in Munich and Berlin.

Party career and local offices

Junge Union and the CSU

Thomas Silberhorn joined the Junge Union, the shared youth organisation of the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU), in 1985, and the CSU itself in 1987. From 1995 to 2003 he sat on the state committee of the Junge Union in Bavaria, and from 1998 to 2002 on the federal executive of the Junge Union Deutschlands. The Bundestag publishes these party details from members’ own disclosures.

In Upper Franconia he moved from a local branch into the regional executive. From 1998 to 2003 he was chairman of the CSU in Memmelsdorf. The biography issued for the 16th Bundestag also recorded him, as of 2009, as a member of the executive of the CSU association for the rural district of Bamberg (Bamberg-Land) since 1997, and of the Upper Franconia Bezirksvorstand since 1999. He chaired the Bamberg-Land association from 2009 to 2021. During the 2021 federal campaign the regional daily inFranken.de still described him as its chairman. The association’s published board no longer gives him that office; it names Johannes Maciejonczyk, identified there as mayor of Burgebrach, as Kreisvorsitzender. The same page says the association has just over 2,000 members in 44 local branches.

He has been a deputy Bezirksvorsitzender of the CSU in Upper Franconia since 2005. The Bezirksverband’s executive list places him among the deputy chairs under Martin Schöffel. On the statewide party executive he was a member from 2001 to 2005 and again from 2007 to 2009. The handbook of the 20th Bundestag again listed membership of the CSU Parteivorstand, and the party’s website lists him as a co-opted member of that body.

In August 2010, on a proposal from party chairman Horst Seehofer, Silberhorn was appointed chairman of the CSU statutes commission. The commission was to prepare amendments discussed in the “Leitbild 2010plus” reform, including wider participation rights for members, before the party congress that October. Under the party statute in the text of 12 October 2024, the statutes commission is one of four standing commissions, and its chair is appointed by the party executive on the chairman’s proposal. His own curriculum vitae still describes him as chairman of the commission since 2010.

Bamberg district council and regional posts

His municipal mandates began in the same year as his first election to the Bundestag. He sat on the municipal council of Memmelsdorf in 2002–2003 and has been a member of the district council (Kreistag) of Bamberg since 2002. In the Bundestag’s register of members’ posts the Kreistag seat is recorded as unpaid, and the CSU’s published list of its group on that council includes him.

A non-party civic office appears in the same early biography. As of 2009 the Bundestag recorded him as district chairman of the Europa-Union Deutschland in Bamberg since 1998. The Bamberg branch’s contact page later names Jonas Merzbacher as first chairman. Shorter biographies for later electoral terms omit both that Europa-Union post and the Memmelsdorf council seat, while they continue to list the Kreistag membership and the Upper Franconia deputy chairmanship.

Elections to the Bundestag

The Bamberg constituency

Thomas Silberhorn has stood in the Bamberg constituency at every election to the German Bundestag since 2002. The seat is in Upper Franconia, in northern Bavaria. Official constituency directories number it 237 for the elections of 2002 and 2005, 236 from 2009 through 2021, and 235 for the election of 23 February 2025.

The delimitations published for 2013, 2017, 2021 and 2025 give the constituency the same municipalities: the independent city of Bamberg, part of Landkreis Bamberg and part of Landkreis Forchheim. The Bamberg-district portion includes Hallstadt, Hirschaid, Schlüsselfeld, Strullendorf and the Verwaltungsgemeinschaften of Burgebrach, Ebrach and Lisberg; the district’s other municipalities are placed in the Kulmbach constituency. The Forchheim portion includes the town of Forchheim together with Eggolsheim, Hallerndorf, Heroldsbach, Igensdorf, Neunkirchen am Brand and several Verwaltungsgemeinschaften, while the rest of that district, including Ebermannstadt and Gräfenberg, is in the Bayreuth constituency.

For both the 2021 boundaries, measured at 31 December 2019, and the 2025 boundaries, measured at 31 December 2023, the Federal Returning Officer recorded 37 municipalities and an area of 1,003.1 square kilometres. Population on those dates was about 241,100 and 239,300.

Results, 2002–2025

Silberhorn, the candidate of the Christian Social Union, won the direct mandate at each election from 2002 to 2025. A compilation by the Bavarian state returning officer lists his constituency mandate as running from 2002, and he took part in the votes at the opening sitting of the 15th Bundestag on 17 October 2002. The Bundestag’s biography records him as a member since 2002; his current mandate is the constituency seat for Bamberg.

On 22 September 2002, in constituency 237, 138,017 of 170,527 eligible voters voted, a turnout of 80.9 percent. Of 136,166 valid first votes the CSU received 82,665 (60.7 percent), the Social Democratic Party 31,997 (23.5 percent), Alliance 90/The Greens 12,341 (9.1 percent) and the Free Democratic Party 5,356 (3.9 percent). The CSU’s second-vote share was 60.9 percent (83,568 of 137,169 valid second votes).

On 18 September 2005 the constituency returning officer reported Silberhorn elected with 76,536 first votes (57.4 percent). Daniel Höltgen (SPD) was second with 31,777 (23.8 percent), ahead of Ursula Sowa (Greens) with 13,782 (10.3 percent). Turnout was 78.3 percent (135,999 of 173,588 eligible voters). The CSU received 67,980 second votes (50.5 percent).

In constituency 236 on 27 September 2009, Silberhorn’s first-vote share fell to 49.1 percent (62,548). Andreas Schwarz (SPD) received 26,044 (20.4 percent), Sebastian Körber (FDP) 13,590 (10.7 percent) and Lisa Badum (Greens) 11,726 (9.2 percent). Turnout was 72.8 percent (129,049 of 177,197). The CSU’s second-vote share was 44.9 percent (57,433).

On 22 September 2013 Silberhorn took 65,723 first votes (52.2 percent) and Schwarz 28,794 (22.9 percent). Turnout, 70.5 percent, was the lowest of the series (126,869 of 179,923 eligible voters). The CSU polled 61,546 second votes (48.9 percent).

On 24 September 2017 Silberhorn was again the directly elected candidate, with the CSU’s 60,675 first votes (42.1 percent). The SPD was second with 29,475 (20.4 percent), ahead of the Alternative for Germany with 16,603 (11.5 percent). Turnout rose to 79.6 percent (145,222 of 182,513). CSU second votes were 56,138 (38.9 percent).

The result of 26 September 2021 was his lowest first-vote share, 54,726 (37.0 percent). Schwarz received 28,123 (19.0 percent), Badum 22,728 (15.4 percent) and Michael Weiß (AfD) 13,279 (9.0 percent). Turnout was 81.4 percent (148,660 of 182,586 eligible voters). The CSU’s second-vote share was 33.4 percent (49,463).

On 23 February 2025, in constituency 235, the Federal Returning Officer recorded Silberhorn as elected with 61,044 first votes (39.4 percent). Michael Adam Weiß (AfD) was runner-up with 28,891 (18.7 percent), 32,153 votes behind; the SPD received 22,569 (14.6 percent). Of 181,281 eligible voters, 155,529 voted, a turnout of 85.8 percent. The CSU received 57,362 second votes (37.0 percent).

Parliamentary work, 2002–2014

European affairs, trade and legal affairs

Thomas Silberhorn entered the Bundestag in 2002 for the Christian Social Union (CSU), representing Bamberg. In April 2004 the CSU Landesgruppe described him as a member of the Bundestag committee on European Union affairs when, during the federalism commission’s talks, he joined its European and foreign-policy spokesman, Gerd Müller, and Hans-Peter Friedrich in arguing that EU legislation was sidelining national parliaments and in calling for Bundestag information on Coreper negotiations, a mandate normally binding the German minister in the Council, reserved approval for treaty change, accessions, EU own resources and the German commissioner, and a Bundestag office in Brussels.

In June 2006, already speaking for the Landesgruppe on European policy, he welcomed that Brussels office and an agreement with the federal government on the Bundestag’s EU role, which he said closed a gap with the Bundesrat: members would receive Coreper material and early-warning reports, and the government would have to seek agreement before departing from a Bundestag position in the Council. In April 2007, after the EU committee met Commissioner Leonard Orban, he demanded that German be treated as a working language alongside English and French and that politically important Commission texts, including accession progress reports, appear in German.

A Bundestag biography archived in May 2012 listed him as a full member of the EU affairs committee and as a deputy member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the subcommittee on European law and the Joint Committee. In February 2012, as the Landesgruppe’s foreign-policy spokesman, he commented on a cabinet paper on shaping globalisation and said German diplomacy should do more for export promotion and secure trade routes, inside European and transatlantic partnerships rather than instead of them.

Before the Bundestag vote of 29 September 2011 on enlarging the European Financial Stability Facility, he wrote that he had backed the first loan programme for Greece and the creation of the temporary facility, but not its expansion. Aid, he argued, was acceptable only as a last resort, under strict conditions and for a limited time; a structure aimed at preventing any euro-area default let investors bet against states while taxpayers carried the risk and could pull more countries under the umbrella. n-tv listed him among ten Union members voting no. The CDU/CSU and the Free Democratic Party still assembled a chancellor’s majority of 315 votes for raising Germany’s guarantee framework from €123 billion to about €211 billion.

On legal policy, the CDU/CSU group in October 2010 re-elected him Obmann, or group coordinator, on the legal affairs committee, with 94.01 percent of the vote, to coordinate the CDU, the CSU and the FDP. He pointed to the coalition compromise on preventive detention, negotiations on custody for unmarried fathers, and a coalition-agreement review of experience with deleting child-pornography sites, which he said should settle the dispute over access-blocking rules. The Bundestag biography dates the Obmann post from 2009 to 2013; its biographical text is based on members’ own information.

Leadership in the CDU/CSU group

The CSU’s own historical register lists him, from 2005 to 2013, as spokesman of the CSU Landesgruppe in the Bundestag for foreign affairs, defence, EU affairs, economic cooperation and development, and human rights and humanitarian aid.

On 8 January 2014 the Landesgruppe unanimously elected him a deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU Bundestag group for interior affairs, law and consumer protection. He was one of three CSU deputy chairs, with Landesgruppe leader Gerda Hasselfeldt as first deputy and Georg Nüßlein covering environment and health, and he described the job as a continuation of his work as Obmann. On 17 February 2014 Der Spiegel reported a CSU statement that he was to succeed Christian Schmidt as parliamentary state secretary at the development ministry once Schmidt became agriculture minister, and that Friedrich would take the deputy chair Silberhorn was leaving.

Economic cooperation and development, 2014–2018

Appointment and responsibilities

In February 2014, after Hans-Peter Friedrich resigned as federal agriculture minister in the Edathy affair, the Christian Social Union in Bavaria named Thomas Silberhorn to succeed Christian Schmidt as parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. Schmidt took agriculture, and Friedrich moved into the CDU/CSU Bundestag deputy chairmanship Silberhorn was leaving. Bundestag biographies record him in the development post from 2014 until March 2018, under Development Minister Gerd Müller, also of the CSU, in Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet.

For the duration of that office he was, ex officio, Germany's governor of the African Development Bank and the African Development Fund in Abidjan, a role the Bundestag lists as ending in March 2018. He was the ministry's public voice on bilateral files with African governments, including politically motivated suspensions of cooperation, while Müller remained the author of the Africa strategy.

Africa policy and multilateral banks

The ministry treated 2017 as an Africa year, coinciding with Germany's G20 presidency, and put more weight on private investment and selected reform partners than on aid spread evenly across countries.

In January 2017 Müller—not Silberhorn—presented the BMZ discussion paper Africa and Europe – A new partnership for development, peace and a future, the cornerstones of a "Marshall Plan with Africa", tied to the African Union's Agenda 2063. It proposed "reform partnerships" with governments showing reliability, legal certainty and political participation; official aid used to mobilise private capital; and pillars on economy and jobs, peace, and democracy and human rights. Citing the International Monetary Fund, it said Africa needed about 20 million new jobs a year.

Silberhorn presented that agenda rather than drafting it. On 1 February 2017 he introduced the Marshall Plan and a G20 partnership with Africa to a network of G20 think tanks in Johannesburg, citing a German–South Africa migration dialogue and the jobs figure. The itinerary also included talks in Gaborone with the Southern African Development Community on regional integration and trade with the European Union, and, in Namibia, meetings on bilateral cooperation and on the dialogue over the colonial past with the foreign minister and Herero and Nama representatives.

A separate instrument, the Compact with Africa, was pushed in the G20 finance track, with Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble a principal advocate, and was discussed with African leaders in Berlin in June 2017. Participating states were to adopt reforms meant to attract investors, with support from the G20, the World Bank Group, the IMF and the African Development Bank. By then Ivory Coast, Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal and Tunisia had registered interest. An Africa strand remained at the July Hamburg summit, though climate and transatlantic disputes overshadowed it.

As German governor he attended the bank's annual meetings in Ahmedabad on 22–25 May 2017, on food security, rural development and jobs. He tied rural hunger to weak land rights and said he would discuss the G20 agenda and Müller's plan with African delegations; the meetings also launched Fast Track Africa, from a group chaired by former federal president Horst Köhler and former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan.

In June 2015, after President Pierre Nkurunziza sought a third term contrary to the 2000 Arusha Accords, and after a failed coup and reports of torture, the ministry suspended government-related cooperation with Burundi and cancelled talks on new pledges. Silberhorn told Deutsche Welle the step, which Frank-Walter Steinmeier had flagged a month earlier, answered torture of opponents and the killing of wounded soldiers. Of €52.5 million planned for 2014–15, advice to the government, joint conferences and KfW investments were frozen, as was a further €40 million; basic-needs aid, including for refugees, was to continue, and he urged the EU, the African Union and the East African Community to insist on free elections.

Bilateral reform partnerships followed as a country-level form of the Compact. In December 2017 Germany agreed one with Ghana, the third after Tunisia and Côte d'Ivoire: a €100 million framework, about 85 percent concessional loans, aimed at renewable energy and infrastructure. Steinmeier, by then federal president, presented it in Accra.

Reception and criticism

Responses divided over investment rhetoric and African ownership. At Davos, Nigerian entrepreneur Tony Elumelu welcomed a private-sector push, while other African comments reported by Deutsche Welle asked who would gain and warned of lost policy autonomy; African Development Bank president Akinwumi Adesina said any plan had to tackle youth unemployment. African Union commissioner Martial De-Paul Ikounga said an item called a "Marshall Plan" should not be on the AU agenda, calling the term misleading and patronising; Namibian economist Job Shipululo Amupanda said it denied African agency.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote that the historical programme's billions were absent and that money would go to "reform champions". Die tageszeitung called the paper a "Mogelpackung": expectations without new finance, and a demand that Africa "do more itself" beside EU trade agreements—which Müller had backed—that required poorer southern African states to open their markets.

In November 2017 Welthungerhilfe and Terre des Hommes warned that aid risked being steered by the domestic migration and security debate, and called separate Africa initiatives from the development, finance and economy ministries incoherent. A Deutsche Welle commentary argued that the Compact left little leverage over authoritarian partners such as Rwanda, while Berlin and the EU were already working with Sudan and Eritrea to limit migration. Development organisations accepted reform conditions in principle but asked that investment also meet wage and environmental standards and fairer trade, and not be applied unchanged in crisis countries.

Defence policy, 2018–2021

Portfolio under von der Leyen and Kramp-Karrenbauer

In March 2018 Thomas Silberhorn moved from parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development to the same rank at the Federal Ministry of Defence, in Angela Merkel’s fourth cabinet. A Christian Social Union in Bavaria member of the Bundestag, he was one of two parliamentary state secretaries under Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen, covering equipment and international armaments policy, planning, the budget and controlling, law, and infrastructure, environmental protection and services, and representing her in the defence and budget committees.

On 17 July 2019, when Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer succeeded von der Leyen, she reappointed Silberhorn and Peter Tauber of the Christian Democratic Union. From April 2021 he also carried Tauber’s duties, until Kramp-Karrenbauer discharged him on 7 December 2021, describing budget, planning, armaments, infrastructure and law as the core of the Bundeswehr. The Bundestag elected Olaf Scholz chancellor the next day, and Silberhorn left the ministry with the change of government.

Equipment, budget and the Bundeswehr

In his report for 2019, Bundestag printed paper 19/16500, parliamentary commissioner Hans-Peter Bartels wrote that the troops still did not feel the declared “trend reversals”: personnel gaps, material shortage and bureaucracy still shaped daily service. The ministry told him it had not yet improved the readiness of the main weapon systems by much, a level comparable with 2017 and 2018. Full equipment was officially aimed at 2031, with only one army brigade due to be fully equipped in 2023, and Bartels wrote that the ministry was already slipping those dates.

Press figures he reproduced put about a quarter of 284 new Puma infantry fighting vehicles as ready in 2019; the project was 57 months late and €1.4 billion over plan, new vehicles were being stripped for parts, and the Puma was set to run alongside the older Marder for years. Tagesspiegel, drawing on Welt am Sonntag’s reading of the classified material report in March 2019, reported average readiness the previous year of 11.6 of 53 Tiger attack helicopters, 17.5 of 71 NH90s and 15.9 of 71 CH-53s, while Inspector General Eberhard Zorn told the defence committee that the main systems had been about 70 percent ready. By the end of 2019, Bartels noted, programmes each put above €5 billion—at least four MKS 180 combat ships, a Patriot successor, a Tornado replacement, a heavy transport helicopter and a follow-on for the first Eurofighters—had still not been launched, though commitment appropriations could have paid for two of them, and new vests, helmets and night-vision devices were arriving too slowly.

On 15 July 2020 Silberhorn visited Mountain Infantry Brigade 23 in Bad Reichenhall and Mountain Infantry Battalion 233 in Mittenwald to review their equipment and talk to soldiers. Leaving office, he said those visits had shown shortages that central buying ranked too low, that discretionary funds for commanders had taken about ten months to introduce, and that an April 2018 approval of about €1.3 billion for vests, helmets and boots was still not fully delivered; he argued for full rather than task-trimmed equipment and put that year’s arms-investment spending at about €10.3 billion, too narrow in his view for major programmes without a multi-year planning law. On the NATO definition, Germany spent 1.25 percent of GDP on defence in 2018, 1.35 percent in 2019, 1.51 percent in 2020 and 1.45 percent in 2021, in 2015 prices, still short of the 2 percent guideline.

Missions, the Sahel and European defence

In Mali, in the Sahel, the Bundeswehr contingent in the European Union Training Mission in Mali was capped at 350 soldiers. After the army overthrew President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta on 18 August 2020, the mission was formally suspended; most activity had already stopped because of COVID-19. On 13 October the EU Political and Security Committee agreed a gradual restart, centred on advice, the G5 Sahel force and central Mali. On 20 October in Bamako, Silberhorn told transitional president Bah N’Daw and vice-president Assimi Goïta that training would resume; Malian reports quoted him promising to preserve relations with Mali. The talks were part of a journey through three Sahel states. The Left’s Tobias Pflüger asked whether Berlin was now treating the coup leaders as the legitimate civilian government the mandate required; the FDP’s Christoph Hoffmann, who had visited Mali in September, instead urged closer development cooperation and reform talks.

On 25 June 2021 a suicide attacker hit a German MINUSMA reconnaissance patrol near Tarkint, about 200 kilometres from the camp at Gao, during the UN operation “Magpie.” Der Spiegel, using the briefing that followed, reported that the charge exploded about 20 metres from a German fuel tanker, which was damaged but did not explode, and that more than a dozen soldiers were wounded, several seriously. In a special defence-committee sitting Silberhorn and Zorn gave the first detailed account; some members were angry at sparse and contradictory information on what the magazine called the heaviest attack yet on German soldiers in Mali.

In an n-tv interview on 29 January 2020, as Britain left the European Union, he said a strong European pillar of NATO was impossible without the British, who should stay able to join and help finance EU security projects. He added that the United States would not attend to Europe’s neighbourhood as intensively as in Kosovo in the 1990s, and that Germany should not seek a role like that of France or Britain.

Roles since 2021

Spokesperson for transatlantic relations

In the 20th Bundestag the CDU/CSU was in opposition. When Chancellor Olaf Scholz gave his first government statement, on 15 December 2021, the group's chair spoke for the first time as leader of the opposition to the coalition of the SPD, the Greens and the FDP. Scholz had been elected on 8 December 2021. His term ended on 25 March 2025, and he then remained chancellor only in a caretaker capacity until the Bundestag elected Friedrich Merz on 6 May 2025. Silberhorn, a member of the CSU, was elected in December 2021 as the CDU/CSU group's spokesperson for transatlantic relations. The Bundestag biography dates that post from 2021 to 2025. The announcement of the appointment said the brief covered foreign and security policy, economic and trade policy, and cooperation with civil society. In the 20th Bundestag his only recorded committee seat was as a deputy member of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

The post placed him in arguments about the war in Ukraine and about the United States. In an interview the Augsburger Allgemeine published on 25 October 2022, he said American support for Ukraine was greater than that of all European Union states combined, and he read critical American comments as part of the midterm campaign rather than as settled policy. He said the war would end sooner the better Ukraine was armed, that heavy weapons remained indispensable, and that a reconstruction conference should not be used to avoid that support. He also said opinion in the United States was increasingly that Europeans would have to do more for their own security.

Interviewed by n-tv in Chicago on 25 August 2024, during the US presidential campaign, he said he kept up contacts with Republican and Democratic members of Congress and had attended both parties' conventions. He argued that the United States and Europe still shared an interest in stopping Russia in Ukraine even if Donald Trump won, but that if American aid stopped, Europe would have to step in under the leadership of Germany. Asked about China, autocracies, Ukraine and NATO, he said those questions had to be treated together, and that Washington could not regard Russia as only Europe's problem while concentrating on China. He called for strong transatlantic trade without new tariffs, and he described the line associated with Trump as more protectionist in commerce and more isolationist in foreign policy than the Democrats' course, and as less aligned with German and European interests.

Justiziar and the 21st Bundestag

On 23 February 2025 Silberhorn was again returned by direct mandate, for constituency 235, Bamberg, with 39.4 percent of the first votes. The 21st Bundestag met for its constituting sitting on 25 March 2025. On 6 May the house elected Merz chancellor on a proposal from the CDU/CSU and the SPD: he received 325 of 618 votes in a second ballot the same day, after 310 in the first, short of the 316 required. The two groups together held 328 seats, 208 of them in the CDU/CSU, so the Union left opposition as the larger partner in the new coalition.

On 13 May 2025 the CDU/CSU group elected a new executive board. Jens Spahn was already its chair, and Silberhorn and Ansgar Heveling were elected as its two Justiziare, who sit on that board. Inside the group the Justiziar is the contact for legal questions that are not assigned to a particular working group. The office advises on constitutional and parliamentary law, follows cases before the Federal Constitutional Court, prepares elections of federal judges and handles electoral law, and its holder helps run the group's day-to-day business and prepare its meetings. Silberhorn said on taking the post that reform of the electoral law would be among his tasks.

In the 21st Bundestag he is a full member of the Committee on Election Scrutiny, Immunity and Rules of Procedure and of the Interior Committee. He is a deputy member of the Committee on the Affairs of the European Union, the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection, the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Subcommittee on Crisis Prevention, Strategic Foresight, Stabilisation and Peacebuilding, the Defence Committee, and the Wahlausschuss. The Wahlausschuss is set up at the start of each electoral term; its twelve members, drawn from the groups, propose the judges of the Federal Constitutional Court whom the plenary then elects. On 21 May 2025 the Bundestag elected the CDU/CSU list (Drucksache 21/210), which named Silberhorn among the members kraft Wahl of the Richterwahlausschuss that, together with the competent federal minister, appoints the judges of the supreme federal courts. He is also a member of the board, and a full member, of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly, and a deputy member of the Joint Committee (Gemeinsamer Ausschuss) and of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.

Political positions

Europe, NATO and transatlantic relations

In a written explanation on 29 September 2011 Silberhorn called the euro a shared currency whose stability served Germany as an exporter and added to the weight of the European Union. He had voted for the first Greek programme and the original, temporary European Financial Stability Facility, and he accepted emergency loans only as a last resort, on strict conditions and for a limited time. He voted against the 2011 enlargement because help, he wrote, "must not be granted without limits", or liquidity aid would become permanent transfers and private losses would be socialised. He wanted sharper Stability and Growth Pact sanctions, an end to European Central Bank bond-buying, creditor losses in any restructuring, and, as a last step, power to suspend euro-area membership so a state could devalue. The Bundestag passed the measure by 523 votes to 85, with three abstentions; Silberhorn was one of ten CDU/CSU members voting against the government line.

On 2 March 2022, after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he said the CDU and CSU had "always expressly" held to the NATO aim of spending 2 percent of economic output on defence, and that the war made the shortfall impossible to set aside. He welcomed Chancellor Olaf Scholz's announcement of that target and a €100 billion special fund as a change of course beyond the coalition agreement, and said Germany and the EU had to be able to provide for their own security in order to strengthen NATO's European pillar. In August 2024 he told n-tv, as the group's transatlantic spokesperson, that a course under Donald Trump of protectionism and isolationism was against German and European interests, and that a deal with Vladimir Putin would not end the war quickly. If the United States stopped military support, Germany would have to go first and Europeans would have to "step into the breach".

Armed forces and security

On 1 June 2022 Silberhorn told the Bundestag that his agreement to the special fund for the Bundeswehr was "beyond question", and that he would watch whether the SPD and the Greens backed it without dissent. In mid-July, after Russian forces took the Luhansk area, he accused the government of "miserable excuses" (erbärmliche Ausflüchte) over arms deliveries to Ukraine.

In March 2025 he argued in Publik-Forum for restoring conscription. The Bundeswehr then had a little over 180,000 soldiers, below the 185,000 set when the draft was suspended, and had missed a target of 20,000 volunteers a year. New NATO requirements, including five or six further German brigades, implied about 270,000 once support units and air defence were counted. "Without conscription it will not work," he wrote; the pre-2011 model no longer fitted, and "whoever wants to live in freedom and democracy must be prepared to defend it."

Family, migration and domestic law

On marriage he argued, for the CDU/CSU, that Article 6 of the Basic Law reserves the institution to a man and a woman and that an ordinary statute cannot redefine it. On 28 June 2012 he said the Union respected same-sex partners who took responsibility for one another, but rejected both opening marriage to same-sex couples and equating registered life partnerships with marriage. "For the CDU and CSU it is settled: marriage remains the union of a man and a woman." On 19 December 2013, at the first reading of a Left Party bill, he cited the Federal Constitutional Court's description of marriage as a lasting union of a man and a woman, accepted successive adoption because the court required it, and distinguished that from joint adoption. Redefinition by simple statute, he said, would be a constitutional amendment "by stealth" (auf kaltem Wege). On 30 June 2017 the Bundestag passed the Bundesrat bill by 393 votes to 226, with four abstentions. Silberhorn voted no. The CDU/CSU split 75 yes to 225 no, so his vote was with the group majority.

In August 2018, during the dispute over Horst Seehofer's asylum policy, he told the Münchner Merkur that the polarising debate had been necessary because Germany had not exhausted its room for manoeuvre. The Christian Social Union in Bavaria should be clear on the substance and convincing in tone, he said, and correcting expressions such as "Asyltourismus" and "Asylgehalt" was a sign of strength. In June 2025, after the Berlin administrative court held in an urgent ruling that turning back three Somali asylum seekers at the Polish border had been unlawful, he said a final court, if necessary the European Court of Justice, had to decide. If anyone invoking asylum had a right to a Dublin procedure, "this legal situation is still not satisfactory." Irregular migration, he said, had to be fought, "and therefore we must also reserve the right to have the Dublin Regulation amended."

Personal life and other affiliations

Family and residence

The Bundestag biography of Thomas Silberhorn, which the parliament says is based on members' own statements, records that he was born on 12 November 1968 in Kemmern, in Landkreis Bamberg in Bavaria, and that he is Catholic, married and the father of two sons. The published text does not name his wife or his sons. On his own website he writes that he is at home in Hirschaid, married, with two children, and rooted in Upper Franconia. The Bundestag page gives a parliamentary office in Berlin and a constituency office at Luitpoldstraße 55 in Bamberg; those are office addresses, not a street address for a private home.

Memberships and outside income

The curriculum vitae published by Bühner & Partner Rechtsanwälte mbB in Nuremberg states that, during his law studies from 1987 to 1992, he held a scholarship from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, and that he has been a lawyer (Rechtsanwalt) since 2001. A 2014 foundation page reprinting a Tagesspiegel report also describes him as a former scholarship holder from that period of study. An archived Bundestag biography from 2010 likewise listed him as a lawyer since 2001. The current disclosure does not describe the admission as suspended; it records a paid side activity as a lawyer.

In Germany, members file interests under the code of conduct in sections 45 and following of the Members of the Bundestag Act. Notices are due within three months of taking a seat, and changes within three months; after processing and a check of whether publication is required, the entries appear on the biography page. Since 19 October 2021 the rules have been the eleventh part of the Act, with detail in Council of Elders provisions of 12 May 2022. The Bundestag states that the mandate is meant to be central, while other professional activity is in principle allowed, subject to bans on certain benefits and to duties covering the last occupation, paid side work, posts in companies, public-law bodies, associations and foundations, shareholdings, and agreements about future activities. Many notifiable posts are unpaid. Income must be stated to the cent if it exceeds 1,000 euro in a month or, otherwise, 3,000 euro in a calendar year.

On the biography page dated 30 October 2026, the published interests are a pre-mandate post as a lawyer at the firm of Prof. Schweizer in Munich and Berlin; a side activity as a lawyer at Bühner & Partner Rechtsanwälte mbB in Nuremberg, at 556.00 euro gross a month; honorary membership of the district council of Landkreis Bamberg; and, from 6 June 2025, honorary membership of the board of trustees of the Woelfl-Haus-Stiftung in Bonn. Those categories list no company offices, shareholdings or donations. The 2010 biography instead published self-employed legal work in Berlin, entered for 2010 at income step 1 for one client, and honorary membership of the presidium of Förderkreis Deutsches Heer e.V. in Bonn.