Berlin mayor faces calls to resign after playing tennis during city blackout | Germany
Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner is facing calls to resign after it was revealed that he chose to play tennis hours after a stroke triggered by an arson attack in a large part of the city and then misled the public about it.
Areas southwest of the German capital were slowly returning to normal after the longest power outage since the Second World War, with Wegner admitting he was not exactly forthcoming about his actions when the outage began.
Leftist militants claimed responsibility for Saturday’s attack, which deliberately cut off power to nearly 45,000 households and more than 2,000 businesses, raising troubling questions about Germany’s preparations for sabotage.
Wegner confirmed report from public broadcaster RBB He said that he was at the tennis court that day between 13.00 and 14.00 in the afternoon with his partner, Berlin education minister Katharina Günther-Wünsch.
Wegner, from the chancellor’s conservative Christian Democratic Union party, Friedrich Merz, told reporters on Sunday that he was working around the clock to reduce the impact of the blackout and restore electricity.
“I wasn’t bored or putting my feet up, but I was on the phone all day trying to coordinate and get as much information as possible,” he said, “and I was literally locked in my home office.”
He acknowledged late Wednesday that his word choice was below average.
“Looking back, I should have said on Sunday what I did on Saturday,” he said. “Yes, at one point I said: ‘I need a short break, I need to clear my head.’ “For me, the best way to do this is through sports.”
Eight months before regional elections in which Wegner was expected to run again, a growing chorus was saying that Wegner had lost his mandate to remain in office.
Far-right Alternative für Deutschland Polls are rising in Berlin“It’s bad enough that the mayor of Berlin didn’t take the emergency caused by a terrorist attack on the city’s infrastructure seriously enough to cancel the tennis match,” he said. Kristin Brinker, leader of the AfD’s regional parliamentary group, said Wegner also “lied to the faces of the people of Berlin.”
Steffen Krach, the mayoral candidate of the Social Democrats, junior partners in Wegner’s ruling coalition, called the mayor’s actions “unacceptable” and “unbecoming” of his office.
Wegner met with CDU MPs in Berlin early Thursday and asked for their support. “Extremely difficult situation in the press”According to the local BZ newspaper.
The swirling scandal recalled Carlos Mazón’s resignation last year as president of Spain’s eastern region of Valencia, after it emerged that he had spent more than three hours having lunch with a journalist following devastating floods that left the region dead in 2024, killing 229 people.
Others saw echoes of Armin Laschet, the leading CDU candidate who will replace Angela Merkel as chancellor in the 2021 election, being forced to apologize after appearing to joke with officials while visiting a community affected by deadly flash floods. Two months later he lost the chancellorship to Olaf Scholz.
The Wegner incident was quickly dubbed “tennis gate”, with leading Greens MP Ricarda Lang stating harshly about X: “At least Kai Wegner got the net on Saturday.” in German, netz (net) can also mean a mobile phone signal; something tens of thousands of Berliners have been without for more than four days.
Another meme, playing on Liz Truss’ short tenure and the tabloid stunt in 2022, asked who would last longer, the then British prime minister or a rotting lettuce. A. to mail He showed a photo of the mayor next to a tennis ball and asked: “Can Kai Wegner outlast this lettuce?”
