Kai aus der Kiste – that's the name of a children's book that was published almost a hundred years ago and was a great success. The Berlin street boy Kai creates the unbelievable in it. When an American chocolate manufacturer wants to sell his products to men, women and children in the German capital, he travels to Berlin and calls for an advertising competition. Whoever impresses him with original advertising ideas collects points and can become the advertising king in the end.

Markus Wehner

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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Kai does everything he can to win the seemingly hopeless affair. He manages, packed in a box, to get into the posh hotel where the American magnate stayed, and with his consent he can take part in the competition. With the help of his gang of street boys, who call themselves the Black Hand, he succeeds in impressing the manufacturer with all sorts of unusual advertising campaigns and at the same time outdoing his competitor, a trained advertising agent. In the end, Kai wins the competition, becomes the king of advertising and later the general director of the American chocolate company in Berlin.

In recent weeks, another quay in Berlin has written a similar story. Kai Wegner, the chairman of Berlin's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), has achieved something that no one would have thought he could do just a few weeks ago. Shortly before the repeat election in February, the Berlin SPD had mocked the "lonely quay", with which no other party wanted to merge.

Fighting against the image as a piety party

And even after the Berlin CDU won the election with more than 28 percent and a lead of ten percentage points over the Social Democrats and Greens, who were tied on a par, the CDU man was still considered a "king without a country" who would not succeed in forging a coalition. SPD woman Franziska Giffey should continue to pull the matter with the Greens and the Left, so advised the head of the federal SPD. Its party chairman, Saskia Esken, accused Wegner of dividing Berlin. Many days after the election, it still seemed clear that the 50-year-old trained insurance salesman from Spandau would not govern.

But then came the decisive turning point. Giffey rejected the Greens and the Left and entered into coalition talks with the CDU. For this, she was met with hatred from her own party. In the eyes of the youth organization Jusos and many party leftists, entering into an alliance with the Berlin CDU, and not least with Kai Wegner, was the greatest fall from grace in colorful, hip and oh-so-progressive Berlin.

On Monday afternoon this week, Kai Wegner is standing in a room called Werkstatt 26 on the Euref campus, a hip area around the Schöneberg Gasometer, where companies from the energy transition, sustainability and alternative mobility have settled. The party congress celebrates its chairman here. The capital's CDU is modern, it can be a big city, and the diversity of the metropolis is its greatest opportunity, says Wegner. It is good that climate protection is now a matter for his party, because the CDU will take away people's fears of it.

Only when he says that there should also be green waves for motorists and parking spaces in the future and that women and men in uniform, i.e. those from the police, should no longer be met with mistrust, does it become clear that it is a party congress of the CDU and not a meeting of representatives of successful environmental start-ups. Wegner encourages his senators-designate and says it doesn't matter that no one knows them. "That was also the case for me six months ago."

In recent years, Wegner has fought with considerable diligence against the image of the capital's CDU as a piety party that is rooted in the provincial structures of West Berlin district politics, focused solely on the issue of internal security and, in case of doubt, still staunchly right-wing. When Wegner took over the state presidency in 2019 and rebelled against Merkel's confidante Monika Grütters, the federal commissioner for culture and the media, it was seen as a rollback to the unfortunate times of backroom politics of the Capital Union. After all, Grütters stood for the goal of turning Berlin's CDU into a liberal city party. But she had not been strongly committed to it.