The longest blackout in Berlin, since Hitler killed himself, was last January as temperatures hovered below freezing. The Russian-directed “Vulkan” arson attack on a cable bridge in the city’s southwest stopped electricity to 45,000 households and 2,200 businesses, with some 100,000 residents left without heat.

The Mayor basically played tennis from the start, with another member of government and his partner Katharina Günther-Wünsch, claiming he needed to avoid work stress. And he delayed making visits to the people suffering. That performance has predictably negatively affected his ability to lead the government, although it’s still unclear if he understands why.

Now Kai Wegner has abandoned his candidacy for the September 20 election, because his own party has demanded he go further and resign the office itself.

Wegner conceded to communication errors in his handling of the major electricity outages after sabotage in Berlin a few months ago. He had come under fire for repeatedly misrepresenting his personal role in the crisis management process.

Reports of him playing tennis amid the blackout, in particular, grabbed the headlines.

“Yes I made communcations [sic] errors. And that was a mess. Therefore I apologize,” Wegner said.

That was a mess. He apologized for making a mess. Not to the people. Not for what the people suffered. For the abstract concept of making a mess. That’s virtue signaling to the group attacking infrastructure that next time they should submit a better disinformation playbook.

The CDU party thought he did a great job. It had confirmed him as lead candidate with 93% of the vote after the January blackout non-apology. The party gladly ran on a literally cold and cruel platform all the way to July 1, when a poll showed their out-for-tennis man had dropped the to ball to fourth place, with a Left party in the lead. Days later, a court filing proved exactly how the Mayor had lied about his role on the day of the attack. By Friday, five members of his own base (presumably themselves taking a break from taking a break) circulated an open letter demanding he resign immediately and abandon the candidacy.

The signers are a who-is-who of the CDU, an elitist investor, an elitist market lobbyist, an elitist tobacco lobbyist, and then two officials from the districts that froze. Notably, the letter explicitly forgave the tennis decision and condemned only getting caught for it. So much for those two officials from the district showing they care. Their core argument was to spare the CDU a campaign in which every billboard reminds voters that he got caught lying about January 3. Since Wegner has only conceded the candidacy, he apparently intends to stay on until a new coalition forms.

The letter says nothing about who attacked the city, or how to stop anyone from doing it again. The saboteurs burned a cable bridge, and when the Mayor got caught treating it like business as usual, his party burned him. Everyone involved seems to argue that the real damage was to their messaging, not the 100,000 people being represented by a heated tennis ball.