Berlin’s 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.
Districts in the south-west of the German capital were gradually returning to normal after the longest power cut since the second world war as Wegner acknowledged he had not been entirely forthcoming about his actions when the outage began.
Leftwing militants claimed responsibility 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.
Wegner confirmed a report by the public broadcaster RBB that he had been on a tennis court that day with his partner, the Berlin education minister, Katharina Günther-Wünsch, between 1 and 2pm.
Wegner, from the conservative Christian Democratic Union party of the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, 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.
“I 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,” he said,and had “literally locked myself in my office at home”.
Late on Wednesday he acknowledged his choice of words had been sub-par.
“Looking back, I should have said on Sunday what I did on Saturday,” he said. “Yes, at some point I said: ‘I need a short break, I need to clear my head.’ And the best way for me to do that is with sport.”
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.
The far-right Alternative für Deutschland, which has been rising in the polls in Berlin, said it was “bad enough the Berlin mayor does not take an emergency situation caused by a terrorist attack on the city’s infrastructure seriously enough to cancel his tennis match”. Wegner also “lied to the people of Berlin’s faces”, said Kristin Brinker, the AfD regional parliamentary group leader.
Steffen Krach, the mayoral candidate from the Social Democrats, junior partners in Wegner’s ruling coalition, deemed the mayor’s actions “unacceptable” and “unworthy” of his office.
Wegner met CDU lawmakers in Berlin early on Thursday and asked for their support given the “extremely difficult situation in the press”, the local newspaper BZ reported.
The swirling scandal recalled the resignation last year of Carlos Mazón 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.
Others saw echoes of a lapse of judgment by Armin Laschet, the CDU frontrunner to replace Angela Merkel as chancellor in the 2021 election, who was forced to apologise 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.
The Wegner affair was quickly nicknamed “tennis-gate”, with the prominent Greens MP Ricarda Lang drily noting on X: “At least Kai Wegner had a net on Saturday.” In German, Netz (net) can also mean a mobile phone signal, something tens of thousands of Berliners were without for more than four days.
Another meme played on Liz Truss’s brief tenure and the 2022 tabloid stunt asking who would last longer, the then British prime minister or a decaying lettuce. A post showed a picture of the mayor next to a tennis ball, with a caption asking: “Can Kai Wegner outlast this lettuce?”
