State politics | Berlin: Three lost years

At least the pin is still there: Kai Wegner (CDU) is currently experiencing his last days in office. Photo: dpa/Christophe Gateau “The best for Berlin” was what the CDU and SPD promised when they signed their coalition agreement in 2023. Three and a half years later, little of it remains. Governing Mayor Kai Wegner (CDU) had to forego another term in office in the middle of the election campaign and left the top candidate of his party to Finance Senator Stefan Evers. Wegner had stumbled upon the fabric of lies that he had built up around his crisis management of the day-long power outage at the beginning of the year. If there is no complete reversal of the trend in the few days until the election, it should already be clear that the coalition will be voted out on Sunday. For more than a year, the CDU and SPD together have not achieved more than 35 percent in the polls.

There was once a hopeful start. The preamble to the coalition agreement states that they want to risk “a new beginning for the city.” The “renewal” that the coalition members planned was also reflected in personnel. An unusually large number of newcomers and newcomers to politics received positions. With limited success. Only the former Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution Felor Badenberg (CDU) remained in office as Justice Senator until the end of the legislative period. The lawyer and lobbyist Manja Schreiner (CDU) had to resign as transport senator in 2024 after it became known that she had plagiarized more than two thirds of the pages of her dissertation. She fell easy: Schreiner is now the managing director of the Berlin Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

The position of Senator for Culture proved to be an ejection seat: the music manager Joe Chialo (CDU) resigned in May 2025 in protest against cuts in his department. At the time, it was not yet known that, according to an audit report from the state auditor's office, CDU representatives had "evidently illegally" attempted to shift funds from the cultural department to projects run by people close to them who were primarily committed to the fight against anti-Semitism. Chialo's successor, cultural manager Sarah Wedl-Wilson (CDU), also resigned in April 2026 when the public prosecutor's office investigated her for infidelity in the affair. The learning effect for the CDU and SPD was small. The final report of the investigative committee into the affair, which the coalition voted against the opposition factions, claims to have identified “no inadmissible political influence.”

The personnel castling in the Senate reached its grotesque climax in the spring of this year. In March, State Secretary Martina Klement (CSU), who is responsible for administrative modernization and digitalization in the Senate Chancellery, unexpectedly moved to the Brandenburg cabinet as Economics Minister. Klement was responsible for one of the few projects for which the Wegner Senate received cross-party support: she steered the administrative reform that was intended to bring order to Berlin's administrative chaos.

Numerous projects barely made it past the announcement.

Completely successful: Klement painstakingly listed all administrative processes and tried to assign clear responsibilities to them. “What has been achieved so far really deserves recognition,” said Green Party lead candidate Werner Graf in June in the House of Representatives, whose party, like Die Linke, was brought on board to pass the necessary constitutional changes.

But in the last few meters the success story took a turn. After Klement's change, Wegner - according to her own statement after a phone call that lasted only a few minutes - appointed the entrepreneur Matthias Hundt as her successor. "I heard the same thing about Martina Klement: 'There's nothing to be found about this woman.' That seems to be a good omen," said Wegner in a press conference about the unknown's surprising appointment.

A little more research would have been helpful. Hundt was under investigation for delaying bankruptcy. Hundt made every effort to confirm the image of the shell player: after initially offering to resign after 69 days in office, he resigned shortly afterwards. So he had to be released and was still able to collect transitional money. His last farewell greeting: He took his company car with him to his home in Dresden and only reluctantly returned it.

It is unclear what will happen next with the administrative reform. The issue played no role in the election campaign. However, while the structural reform achieved at least measurable progress in real terms, many other projects barely made it past the announcement. The castles in the air are a striking contrast to the pragmatic self-image to which the CDU and SPD have committed themselves. They were most noticeable in the transport sector. In 2024, Transport Senator Ute Bonde (CDU) caused a stir with an opulent plan for the Berlin subway. Parallel to the S-Bahn ring, a new subway line should connect the outskirts, and another should run from Weißensee to the city center.

The reality looks much less rosy. In 2025, the subway reached a low point in punctuality. Six percent of all trains were canceled in 2024. In 2022 it was 0.8 percent. The announcement “The trains are not running at the usual pace today” has become an everyday companion for many Berliners.

When asked about this in the House of Representatives, Bonde reacted angrily. "Crisis? What crisis?” She asked the astonished MPs. A mindset she shares with many of her fellow senators. Almost the entire legislative session was taken up by a lengthy dispute over the state budget, which left even savvy financial fans confused. The coalition initially announced drastic cuts, only to then pass a record budget that used up all reserves. But that didn't last long either: a considerable part of the expenditure was written into the budget as so-called flat-rate reduced expenditure and had to be cut again during ongoing operations.

The most prominent victim of the budget chaos is the lighthouse project of the red-green-red predecessor Senate. Wegner's predecessor Michael Müller (SPD) had made science a top priority and strongly supported Berlin's universities. With success: the capital's universities are now among the best in the country. Science Senator Ina Czyborra (SPD), who often seemed overwhelmed and unhappy, also initially seemed to continue this course. With the conclusion of the university contracts, the universities were promised a strong financial boost.

But that was lost just a few weeks later when it became clear that the budget would not be able to support the increase in funds. Suddenly the opposite was announced: the universities were supposed to cut 140 million euros in the current year 2025 and accept further losses in the following years. Dozens of professorships and ten percent of study places will probably be lost in the coming years.

It's not just the universities themselves that are suffering from this. The target numbers for teacher training students have been lowered. There is already a dramatic shortage of teachers in schools. However, not in everyone's eyes: 500 teachers are currently missing from Berlin schools, Education Senator Katharina Günther-Wünsch (CDU) told RBB at the start of the school year. Three years ago there were 1,000 more. In the meantime, she even put the gap at just 200 teachers.

But the job miracle for educators is based primarily on statistical reinterpretations without actually adding new teachers. For example, trainees have had to teach three more hours since 2024. For the 3,000 teacher candidates in Berlin, this alone corresponds to almost 400 “additional” positions. In reality, little has changed. Most recently, school principals in Marzahn-Hellersdorf warned that they would soon no longer be able to cover the timetable due to a lack of staff.

And there has been little movement on the biggest problem for many Berliners – the rapid rise in rents. Black-red promised to combine new construction and tenant protection. But there was movement, especially in the former. The Senate lowered the requirements for environmental protection and energy efficiency with two laws. Tenant protection only followed tentatively towards the end of the legislative period. The rent register introduced by Building Senator Christian Gaebler (SPD) does not help any tenants directly, but is intended to make it easier to prosecute immorally high rents.

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