In the end, it was one little white lie too many: Kai Wegner, Mayor of the German capital Berlin and a member of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), has decided not to run again in the upcoming Berlin state election in September. He made the announcement on Friday afternoon, insisting that he intends to remain in office until then: “I was elected as Mayor,” he said, almost defiantly, at a press conference.
Since April 2023, Wegner has led a coalition of conservatives and center-left social democrats. He later drew negative headlines for his decision to play tennis during power outage across a sizeable stretch of the German capital at the start of the year.
Reputational fallout from Berlin power outage
On January 3, 2026, a power outage struck the southwestern part of Germany’s largest city. The reason: Unknown perpetrators had carried out an arson attack on high-voltage cables.
This left some 45,000 households without electricity and heating during sub-zero temperatures. It took more than four days to reconnect all residents to the grid, making it the longest power outage in the city since World War II.
About 100,000 people were affected. The power outage hit private households, hospitals, schools and most dramatically nursing homes, from where the elderly had to be evacuated to heated shelters.
The far-left extremist group “Vulkangruppe” initially claimed responsibility for the attack but later denied it. The attack sparked a debate about the security of key infrastructure in Berlin, as well as the city’s crisis response plans.
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A tennis match instead of visiting a shelter
And Mayor Kai Wegner? He went to play tennis that day.
He only admitted this after persistent questioning by journalists. But, he said, he had been reachable at all times and had immediately begun to coordinate the city’s efforts to help people via telephone.
Yet time and again, his account got tangled up in half-truths, and he only admitted what the media had already uncovered about his dubious role on that bitterly cold day in January. The reputational dent remained: Berlin’s most powerful politician had not taken the city’s worst power outage since the end of World War II seriously.
And this week it turned out that Wegner had not, as claimed, handled the situation by phone on the day itself. Now, suddenly, the talk was only of a few text messages. And that’s when even the conservatives in the capital lost their patience: The CDU’s youth organization, the Junge Union, called on Wegner to withdraw his candidacy for the September election, and CDU members in the capital made the same demand in an open letter.
Now, it is unclear who will run for the CDU in the September election in place of Wegner. In what has been seen as linked due to the scandals surrounding Wegner, the CDU has slipped to fourth place in the polls — behind the socialist Left Party, the environmentalist Greens, and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
For that reason alone, it is hard to imagine that Wegner will be able to simply remain in office until the election, as announced.
This article has been translated from German.
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