Berlin The CDU politician Kai Wegner failed again in the election for the new Governing Mayor of Berlin in the third ballot. The 50-year-old missed the simple majority required to be elected as the successor to Franziska Giffey (SPD) in the Berlin House of Representatives on Thursday. He received 79 votes and did not reach the required majority of 80 votes.
The session was then interrupted, now the Council of Elders of the House of Representatives should clarify how possible results of a third round of voting should be interpreted. The Berlin state constitution permits elections by simple majority in the third ballot. However, it is unclear how abstentions should be dealt with. There are no empirical values, as there has never been a third ballot in a mayoral election in Berlin. The meeting is scheduled to resume at around 4:30 p.m.
The parliamentary groups of the Greens and the Left then announced in the RBB that they would apply for the election to be postponed. The next meeting would take place in 14 days, but an earlier date could not be ruled out.
In the first ballot, 71 of the 159 members of parliament voted for Wegner. The CDU has 52 MPs in the new House of Representatives, the SPD 34. Together, the coalition has 86 votes and the opposition from the Greens, Left and AfD has 73.
After the two failed attempts, politicians from the CDU and SPD blamed each other. “There are obviously many in the SPD who are using the election of the governing mayor to settle accounts with Franziska Giffey and Raed Saleh,” said Berlin CDU member of the Bundestag Jan-Marco Luczak to the editorial network Germany (RND). “That is politically irresponsible.” The SPD continues to lose credibility, he said, emphasizing: “The CDU faction is united behind Kai Wegner.”
The Berlin SPD MP Orkan Özdemir told the dpa: “I am very sure that it is from the ranks of the CDU. They have to close their ranks now. (…) I now hope that Mr. Wegner gets his people in line.” This is necessary to prevent another election to the House of Representatives in Berlin. Two “counterparts” who wanted to vote against Wegner were known to the SPD, Özdemir admitted. But there are no more.
The CDU would govern Berlin for the first time since 2001
Wegner had promoted the formation of a black-red coalition in recent weeks. He would be the first governing mayor from the ranks of the CDU after Eberhard Diepgen, who held this office until June 2001. The new coalition of the CDU and SPD is intended to replace the alliance of SPD, Left and Greens that had governed Berlin since 2016.
Unlike the SPD, there had been no public discussions about the black-red alliance among the Berlin Christian Democrats. At a CDU party conference, the coalition agreement passed without a dissenting vote, while the SPD’s approval in a member vote was significantly lower at 54.3 percent. The previous head of government Giffey is to get the post of economics senator in the new Senate.
The CDU emerged as the strongest party from the repeat elections in February, relegating the SPD and the Greens to their places. Giffey was then ready to give up her post for the Black-Red coalition, which she would have kept if Red-Green-Red had continued. The vote in February had become necessary because there had been numerous organizational breakdowns in the regular parliamentary elections in autumn 2021.
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