Kai Wegner no longer wants to be the CDU’s top candidate.Image: keystone
July 10, 2026, 6:54 p.mJuly 10, 2026, 6:54 p.m
A big bang two months before an election in Germany’s capital: the governing mayor of Berlin, Kai Wegner, is giving up his candidacy for the Christian Democratic CDU.
However, he wants to remain head of the town hall until the election to the federal state’s parliament – the House of Representatives – on September 20th and the subsequent formation of a new government.
The 53-year-old announced this at a press conference called at short notice. He is drawing conclusions from a months-long debate about false information about his crisis management after a major power outage in January. This had increasingly put a strain on the CDU’s election campaign, causing great unrest in the party – whose federal chairman is Chancellor Friedrich Merz – and, most recently, calls for withdrawal from its own ranks.
Wegner: “That was crap”
In the past few days he has noticed that he is no longer able to understand the city’s important issues. “I can no longer manage to send messages because another debate overshadows everything,” says Wegner. «Yes, I made communicative mistakes. And yes, believe me, that’s what annoys me the most. And that was crap too,” said the CDU leader for Berlin.
According to information from the German Press Agency (dpa), the Berlin CDU district chairmen want to propose Finance Senator Stefan Evers as the new top candidate at a meeting in the evening. The CDU executive board for the federal state must make the final decision on this.
Wegner said he no longer had to decide that. He called Evers a competent senator – that’s what the heads of departments in the Berlin government are called. Wegner himself wants to return to the House of Representatives as a member of parliament in September, as he said. He is not available as a senator in a new state government.
Wegner has been the governing mayor in a coalition with the social democratic SPD since April 2023. After an arson attack on the power supply on January 3rd, as a result of which 100,000 people in southwest Berlin were without power for days, he came under fire.
Wegner initially concealed the fact that on the first day of the crisis he had played tennis for an hour at lunchtime – with his life partner, Education Senator Katharina Günther-Wünsch (CDU). In the days, weeks and months that followed, inconsistencies with his daily routine on January 3rd repeatedly came to light.
The debate about this has recently picked up speed again: The “Tagesspiegel” quoted the Senate Chancellery on Tuesday as saying that Wegner did not make a business telephone call about the blackout before 12:45 p.m. on January 3rd. He himself said in an interview with Welt TV: “I actually started making the phone calls at 8:08 a.m. I called the crisis teams and the power grid.”
Some time after the power outage, Wegner acknowledged mistakes and apologized for his communication on the subject. He also referred to this in the press conference and said that he was most annoyed by his mistakes.
But: “If I find that I can no longer get through to the issues that are crucial for people, then there must be consequences. Because the city of Berlin is more important than a person, and the city of Berlin and the people of Berlin are more important to me than myself. And the party is also more important to me.”
Prevent left-wing alliance
The CDU must now quickly rally behind a new top candidate and go into the election campaign as a unit, said Wegner. “I want this party to go into the election campaign to prevent a left-wing alliance led by the Left Party. It’s now about strengthening the center in this city so that left-wing extremists don’t take over the leadership in this city.”
CDU is doing poorly in surveys
Despite the debates surrounding his person, Wegner had so far rejected personal consequences. It was only in June that he was elected as his party’s top candidate with almost 93 percent. The opposition has been accusing him of lying for a long time. The coalition partner SPD also moved away from him more and more. SPD top candidate Steffen Krach this week ruled out working with Wegner after the election in September.
Probably also as a result of the months-long discussions about Wegner’s phone calls, the CDU has recently lost significantly in favor of voters. In the latest survey by Infratest dimap, the party slipped to fourth place with just 17 percent, behind the Left, the Greens and the right-wing populist AfD. In the 2023 election, the CDU achieved 28.2 percent. Wegner was then elected – only in the third round of voting – as Governing Mayor and successor to Franziska Giffey (SPD). (sda/dpa)