Wednesday 20th October 2021
Klaus Wowereit desperate
“Berlin is worse positioned than any Kreissparkasse”
In the 13 years of his tenure as Governing Mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit gritted his teeth on the administrative reform. The capital is “worse positioned than any district savings bank,” he says today.
After the recent election mishaps and the grievances at BER Airport, the former governing mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, is taking his city to court. “There is such a thing as collective irresponsibility in Berlin,” he said on Tuesday evening on the rbb television program “Wieprecht”. According to the SPD politician, the administration of the capital is “worse positioned than any district savings bank”.
This is not due to the staff, but to the structures of the administration. The twelve districts would have too much power, especially vis-à-vis the Senate. Wowereit therefore called for profound changes to the administrative structures: “There really has to be a revolution”. “Keeping in new money, getting more staff, but not changing the structures, that’s a waste of money.”
In order to overcome the grievances, Wowereit brought up a “creative team” to organize a “dialogue between citizens’ initiatives and other organizations”. You can’t do that “with the existing structures,” said Wowereit, who was the governing mayor of Berlin from 2001 to 2014. At the end of his term in office, he admitted that he had reached the limits of his power when it came to administrative reform. “You don’t believe how persistent everything can be in this regard,” he said in an interview with the Berlin “daily newspaper”.