OPINION - Beyond the blackout: Political failures and urgent need for security reform in Germany

• The author is director of the Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies (CASSIS) at the University of Bonn.

ISTANBUL

On Jan. 3, 2026, an early morning power outage in Berlin's Steglitz-Zehlendorf district left 45,000 households and 2,200 businesses without power. It took up to five days for power to be fully restored in the affected area. This was the most extensive power outage in post-war history, directly affecting approximately 100,000 people. The cause was an arson attack on a cable bridge in Berlin-Lichterfelde, for which a left-wing extremist group claimed responsibility. The investigation has since been handed over to the Federal Public Prosecutor General.

On Jan. 4, the Berlin Senate declared a major disaster and requested administrative assistance so that the German Armed Forces could be deployed domestically. According to Article 35 (2) and (3) of the German Basic Law, members of the German Armed Forces may only take on police duties if the police are no longer able to do so due to natural disasters or particularly serious accidents. The occurrence of such a state of emergency must be expressly determined by the Federal Government. It was not until Jan. 7 that the operator succeeded in reconnecting all households to the power grid. Berlin's Senator for Economic Affairs Franziska Giffey called for a “comprehensive and practical reassessment of existing transparency obligations.”

Crisis management and political fallout

In Germany, disaster control is the responsibility of the federal states and local authorities, except in cases of tension and defense. This distribution of power had already led to delays, procedural failures, and coordination problems during the devastating floods in the Ahr Valley in 2021, which cost numerous people their lives. The situation that arose in Berlin in the first days of January is not an isolated case. Many local authorities still do not have operational concepts for emergency water supply.

The current debate has focused primarily on secondary aspects that are indicative of Berlin's vulnerabilities but are not central to the fundamental problem of supplying critical infrastructure. As the debate has progressed so far, there is a danger that the threat posed by left-wing extremism and the urgent need to adapt structures to the actual threat situation will not be given sufficient attention.

The fact that Berlin's Governing Mayor Kai Wegner attracted attention on the first day of the crisis with his unprofessional crisis management and also became entangled in contradictions when – instead of coordinating the crisis team – he played tennis with his partner, Berlin's senator for education, was the subject of heated discussion for days and led to calls for his resignation. The statement by the governing mayor, who initially concealed his sporting activity and then explained that he needed to "clear his head" (claiming he had remained at home after 8:00 AM to make phone calls), did little to inspire confidence in the crisis management abilities of the German capital's leadership. Berlin has always tended to ignore the actual strategic situation in a mixture of nonchalance, brusqueness, and a claim to cosmopolitanism, which is sometimes accompanied by provincialism and overconfidence.

Yet there has been no shortage of responses to the challenges of protecting critical infrastructure. In July 2022, the German federal government, under the leadership of the federal interior minister, adopted a strategy to strengthen resilience to disasters, explicitly referring to the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic and the flood disaster in the Ahr Valley in July 2021. The core objective of this resilience strategy is to ‘promote integrated and inclusive disaster management and anchor it in our national and international actions.’ This strategy is committed to a comprehensive approach to disaster management and to adapting capabilities and structures to changing challenges.

Just last year, the German government passed a draft law on the protection of critical infrastructure in the implementation of the EU Directive on the resilience of critical facilities and the associated uniform European minimum standards. For the first time, the law defines important critical infrastructures in Germany in 11 sectors. These include energy, food, water, health, transport and traffic.

Standardizing disaster control across Germany

The German Bundestag has once again reacted quickly to the events in Berlin. On Jan. 15, at the request of the AfD parliamentary group, parliament addressed the issue of strengthening disaster control. The focus was on the demand to strengthen disaster control in Germany in the long term and, in particular, to improve preparedness for large-scale and prolonged power failures by establishing uniform minimum standards for emergency power supply throughout Germany, especially for hospitals, care facilities, control centers and waterworks. After a half-hour debate, the motion was referred to the committees for further consultation.

The events in Berlin at the beginning of the year clearly demonstrated that disaster control in Germany is poorly organized. There is a lack of cross-state exercises and the implementation of uniform standards. The shortcomings in digitalization that affect the whole of Germany have not spared disaster control either. Emergency reserves, in particular stocks of drinking water, medicines and energy, are a particular issue.

It is now also becoming apparent that the shortcomings in the establishment of the National Security Council, which the federal government had decided on in the 2025 coalition agreement, have become visible. Above all, there is a lack of meaningful participation by the federal states and networking between the various areas. To date, Germany has refrained from systematically assessing the risks and providing a uniform overview of the situation. This means that Germany lags far behind its neighboring countries, such as Switzerland and Austria. Until now, there has been a lack of consistent awareness of the actual threat situation.

Wake-up calls are often used in political debate. If the widespread power outage in the state of Berlin in the first days of January 2026 was an alarming signal of the dangers in today's world, then a fundamental change in security policy in Germany should now take place.

*Opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Anadolu's editorial policy.