Embattled centre-right Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner announced Friday that he would not run for re-election just weeks before the vote after facing months of criticism over his response to a major blackout in Berlin.<\/p>\n
“I can no longer get my message out because another debate is overshadowing everything else,” Wegner said Friday.<\/p>\n
“Yes, I made mistakes in communication,” he added, referring to the power cut in January that left roughly 45,000 homes and around 2,200 businesses without power for nearly a week in the middle of a harsh winter.<\/p>\n
Wegner has faced criticism for remaining at home on January 3 rather than rushing to the office or the hardest-hit areas, after an apparent act of sabotage knocked out power to an entire district of the city.<\/p>\n
Wegner previously said he had been making phone calls about the situation throughout that day.\u00a0<\/p>\n
However, call logs obtained by the Tagesspiegel newspaper showed that no official calls were made before 12:45 pm on the day.<\/p>\n
Polls have shown that Wegner, 53, is deeply unpopular and the coalition between his CDU and the centre-left SPD is likely to fall far short of a majority after the September 20 vote.<\/p>\n
A poll in early July had the CDU slumping to fourth place, behind the far-left Die Linke, the Greens and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).<\/p>\n
Wegner’s problems in Berlin mirror those of his party colleague Chancellor Friedrich Merz, likewise mired in miserable poll numbers.<\/p>\n
Merz has struggled to turn around Germany’s sputtering economy or contain the surging far-right AfD, which holds commanding leads in two other eastern states that also hold regional elections in September.<\/p>\n
The AfD has also gained ground in Berlin but Wegner said on Friday he was particularly concerned with the strength of the far-left Die Linke in the city, which now tops some polls.<\/p>\n
Wegner said he was stepping aside partly in hopes that his party could regain ground and “prevent a left-wing alliance” led by that party.<\/p>\n
– Ridicule over tennis –<\/p>\n
Wegner has led Berlin since 2023, after his conservatives won local elections in the left-leaning German capital city for the first time in decades.<\/p>\n
He pledged to modernise the city’s notoriously dense bureaucracy, and on Friday contended that his government had made progress.<\/p>\n
But the January blackout proved his undoing.<\/p>\n
He faced ridicule after belatedly acknowledging that he played tennis for an hour during the day, a detail that was left out his initial accounts.<\/p>\n
An embarrassed Wegner said he had played tennis to “clear my head” but this cut little ice with furious voters.<\/p>\n
Wegner on Friday admitted that his “communication” about the day had been “rubbish” but he defended the city’s response to the blackout.<\/p>\n
“Everyone involved did a good job. We brought the crisis to an end a day and a half early,” Wegner said.<\/p>\n
He offered no opinion on who should replace him as top CDU candidate for the election.<\/p>\n
Stefan Evers, who serves as the city’s finance minister, is widely considered the frontrunner.<\/p>\n
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