Overview
- Following a special meeting, the CDU parliamentary group largely defended the mayor’s crisis management and raised no objections to his one‑hour tennis break, which he later said he should have disclosed sooner.
- The opposition intensified pressure with sharp criticism and some calls for resignation, while the police union downplayed the significance of the break and national CDU leaders urged attention to infrastructure resilience.
- Power was restored on Wednesday after the city’s longest postwar outage, which left roughly 100,000 people without electricity for about four days and prompted temporary use of generators and work on a second provisional line.
- Authorities attribute the outage to a presumed arson attack on a cable bridge, and a group calling itself the Vulkangruppe claimed responsibility in online posts reported by multiple outlets.
- Reporting highlighted delayed activation of central crisis structures and the lack of a dedicated state civil‑protection agency, fueling calls for inquiries and structural reforms to protect critical infrastructure.