Dominic Fritz

Dominic Samuel Fritz (born 28 December 1983) is a German-born politician who has been serving as the mayor of Timișoara since 2020, following the latest Romanian local elections. A member of the Save Romania Union, he is the only mayor in Romania without Romanian citizenship. Prior to becoming the mayor of Timișoara in 2020, Fritz was a member of Alliance 90/The Greens between 2009 and 2019 and also a political advisor to former German president Horst Köhler (whose parents were relocated to Nazi Germany from Rîșcani, northern Bessarabia, now Republic of Moldova) between 2016 and 2019. Fritz is a political scientist by profession. Early life and education Fritz was born on 28 December 1983 in Lörrach, Baden-Württemberg, West Germany. His parents were both teachers. Fritz grew up as the third child of a total of eight siblings in Görwihl in the Southern Black Forest. In 1999, at the age of 16, a scholarship from the Bundestag enabled him to spend a year in the United States. He passed his Abitur at the Jesuit Kolleg St. Blasien in 2003. In the same year, Fritz came to Timișoara for the first time as part of a voluntary social year with the Jesuit European Volunteers, where he worked in a children's hospice in the Freidorf district run by Salvatorian priest and humanitarian , which takes care of orphans and street children in the city. From then on, he will visit Timișoara several times a year, finally buying an apartment in the Iosefin district in 2015. Between 2004 and 2008 he studied political and administrative sciences at the University of Konstanz with a scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. His bachelor thesis addressed social policies in Romania. Later, in 2009, he obtained a master's degree in post-conflict studies at the University of York. In 2006, he did a seven-month internship at the Pentru Voi Foundation, where he established the first mentoring program for adults with intellectual disabilities in Romania.