Berlin\u2019s mayor, Kai Wegner, is facing calls to resign after it emerged he opted to play tennis hours after a crippling blackout triggered by an arson attack hit a large swathe of the city, and then misled the public about it.<\/p>\n
Districts in the south-west of the German capital were gradually returning to normal after the longest power cut since the second world war<\/a> as Wegner acknowledged he had not been entirely forthcoming about his actions when the outage began.<\/p>\n Leftwing militants claimed responsibility<\/a> for the attack on Saturday that deliberately cut the electricity to about 45,000 households and more than 2,000 businesses, and raised troubling questions about German preparedness for sabotage.<\/p>\n Kai Wegner said he had been \u2018on the phone all day trying to coordinate\u2019. Photograph: dts News Agency Germany\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n Wegner confirmed a report by the public broadcaster RBB<\/a> that he had been on a tennis court that day with his partner, the Berlin education minister, Katharina G\u00fcnther-W\u00fcnsch, between 1 and 2pm.<\/p>\n Wegner, from the conservative Christian Democratic Union party of the chancellor, Friedrich Merz<\/a>, had told reporters on Sunday that he had been working round the clock to mitigate the impact of the blackout and get the power back on.<\/p>\n \u201cI was neither bored nor putting my feet up, but was on the phone all day trying to coordinate and get as much information as possible,\u201d he said,and had \u201cliterally locked myself in my office at home\u201d.<\/p>\n Late on Wednesday he acknowledged his choice of words had been sub-par.<\/p>\n \u201cLooking back, I should have said on Sunday what I did on Saturday,\u201d he said. \u201cYes, at some point I said: \u2018I need a short break, I need to clear my head.\u2019 And the best way for me to do that is with sport.\u201d<\/p>\n Eight months before a regional election in which Wegner is expected to stand again, a growing chorus said he had lost the authority to stay in office.<\/p>\n The far-right Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland, which has been rising in the polls in Berlin<\/a>, said it was \u201cbad enough the Berlin mayor does not take an emergency situation caused by a terrorist attack on the city\u2019s infrastructure seriously enough to cancel his tennis match\u201d. Wegner also \u201clied to the people of Berlin\u2019s faces\u201d, said Kristin Brinker, the AfD regional parliamentary group leader.<\/p>\n Steffen Krach, the mayoral candidate from the Social Democrats, junior partners in Wegner\u2019s ruling coalition, deemed the mayor\u2019s actions \u201cunacceptable\u201d and \u201cunworthy\u201d of his office.<\/p>\n People wait at a bus stop in south-west Berlin during the power outage. Photograph: Clemens Bilan\/EPA<\/p>\n Wegner met CDU lawmakers in Berlin early on Thursday and asked for their support given the \u201cextremely difficult situation in the press\u201d<\/a>, the local newspaper BZ reported.<\/p>\n The swirling scandal recalled the resignation last year<\/a> of Carlos Maz\u00f3n as the president of the eastern Spanish region of Valencia after it emerged he had spent more than three hours having lunch with a journalist in 2024 as devastating floods that killed 229 people hit the area.<\/p>\n Others saw echoes of a lapse of judgment by Armin Laschet, the CDU frontrunner to replace Angela Merkel<\/a> as chancellor in the 2021 election, who was forced to apologise<\/a> after appearing to joke with officials while visiting a community stricken by deadly flash floods. He lost the chancellorship two months later to Olaf Scholz<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Wegner affair was quickly nicknamed \u201ctennis-gate\u201d, with the prominent Greens MP Ricarda Lang drily noting on X: \u201cAt least Kai Wegner had a net on Saturday.\u201d In German, Netz (net) can also mean a mobile phone signal, something tens of thousands of Berliners were without for more than four days.<\/p>\n Another meme played on Liz Truss\u2019s brief tenure and the 2022 tabloid stunt <\/a>asking who would last longer, the then British prime minister or a decaying lettuce. A post<\/a> showed a picture of the mayor next to a tennis ball, with a caption asking: \u201cCan Kai Wegner outlast this lettuce?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Berlin\u2019s mayor, Kai Wegner, is facing calls to resign after it emerged he opted to play tennis hours…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":684033,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-684032","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115864102924945016","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=684032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684032\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/684033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=684032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=684032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=684032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}