Berlin’s 2036 Olympic Bid Died in 45 Seconds

On September 24, 2026, Berlin Mayor Wegner stood before the cameras and announced the city was withdrawing its bid to host the 2036, 2040, and 2044 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Inside the German Olympic Sports Confederation, one phrase summed up how the two-year campaign ended: “45 seconds, all gone.”

That was not a figure of speech.

On September 20, Berlin held its state parliament election. The CDU won 18.8% of the vote, down 9.5 percentage points from 2023. The Left Party won 25.7%, doubling its share and achieving its best result ever in Berlin. After the election, Left Party candidate Elif Eralp said: “I think this matter is over, because we won the election precisely with these positions on the Olympics.”

By “these positions,” she meant one thing: opposition to the bid.

During the campaign, Eralp did the math. Berlin’s “Berlin+” bid had a budget of about €4.82 billion, expected revenue of €5.24 billion, and a nominal profit of about €420 million. She pointed out that the €6 million already spent on the bid “is a waste of taxpayers’ money,” while the overall investment would reach “hundreds of millions, even billions, of euros.” She pressed a specific question: would this money be better spent on repairing swimming pools, improving transport, and building housing?

This was not a position unique to the Left Party. In November 2025, Der Tagesspiegel commissioned Civey to conduct a representative survey of 1,000 Berlin residents. 67% opposed the bid, 27% supported it, and 6% were undecided. Two-thirds opposition was fatal for a bid that needed to show the International Olympic Committee “city consensus.”

Berlin was the only one of Germany’s three candidate cities not to hold a referendum. Munich won 66.4% support in a referendum, and Rhine-Ruhr likewise confirmed its public mandate through a referendum. Berlin chose a path that avoided public opinion: no referendum, with the Senate and state parliament directly approving and advancing the bid. This decision staked the bid’s legitimacy entirely on the continued governance of a particular party coalition. The election result on September 20 proved this was a risky move.

The anti-Olympic alliance “NOlympia Berlin” had planned to launch a referendum, but its timeline was expected to reach 2027, while the German Olympic Sports Confederation was to decide on the candidate city on September 26. Berlin could have been chosen as Germany’s representative without a public vote and then failed in a referendum. In reality, it was ended by the political shift before any referendum.

The bid committee had 20 board members, representing politics, business, sports, civil society, and religious groups. These members jointly wrote to Eralp seeking dialogue. Nirumand said Eralp did not reply to the letter or accept other invitations to talk. The September 24 meeting had long been scheduled. It ended the bid.

Even without the political shift, Berlin was at a disadvantage in the German Olympic Sports Confederation’s professional evaluation. The results released on September 22: Munich 87.03, Rhine-Ruhr 85.02, Berlin 74.64. Munich and Rhine-Ruhr both received “very good” ratings; Berlin only “good.” The report noted that Berlin scored relatively high on international influence but lost points on “stability.” Even before the political shift, the evaluation committee had already identified “insufficient democratic legitimacy” as a weakness of Berlin’s proposal.

The “Berlin+” plan had strengths. It planned to coordinate with eastern federal states such as Brandenburg, Saxony, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern to jointly host events, use the disused Tempelhof airport to create venues, and use the Olympics to boost economic vitality in eastern regions. The plan also proposed relying mainly on existing sports facilities to reduce the financial pressure of building new venues. After the bid ended, the governor of Saxony called it “a huge missed opportunity.”

But these visions required time, political stability, and a public mandate. The September 20 election removed all three at once.

Berlin’s withdrawal sits against German Olympic history. 2036 coincides with the 100th anniversary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. On August 1, 1936, Hitler declared the Berlin Olympics open. Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels used those Games as an international showcase to project an image of a “modern and strong” Germany to the world. At the same time, systemic anti-Semitism and political persecution at home were intensifying. Hosting the Olympics at this point would mean Berlin had to handle the memory of this history under global scrutiny.

This was not Germany’s only trauma in Olympic history. During the 1972 Munich Olympics, a terrorist attack at the Olympic Village killed 11 members of the Israeli delegation. Two Olympics, two traumas. When the Berlin state parliament approved the bid plan in May 2026, Left Party and Greens lawmakers criticized it in debate as “empty promises” and “castles in the air,” noting that the actual costs of the previous three Olympics all exceeded initial plans by more than twofold. The historical burden did not cause the withdrawal by itself. It made “opposition” easier to accept.

Berlin’s withdrawal is not isolated in global Olympic bidding. During the bidding for the 2024 Olympics, Boston withdrew due to lack of public support, Rome gave up because of opposition from a new mayor, and Hamburg rejected its bid in a referendum with 51.6% voting against. Of the original multiple candidate cities, only Paris and Los Angeles remained, and the IOC had to break with precedent by awarding the 2024 and 2028 Olympics as a package.

In May 2026, Hamburg held another referendum, and 54.9% of residents rejected a plan to bid for the 2036 Olympics. This was the second time Hamburg said no to the Olympics via referendum. In 2015, they had already rejected a 2024 Olympic bid with 51.6% voting against. A city pushing the Olympics away twice in a row shows this has moved beyond partisan politics and become a sustained public opinion that crosses election cycles.

The IOC has noticed. In 2025, new President Kirsty Coventry launched a “pause and think” seminar after taking office, deciding to re-examine the bidding process. Previously, under Thomas Bach, the Olympic bidding rules had changed from an “application system” to an “invitation system,” scrapping the rule that the host must be chosen seven years in advance and reducing bidding costs by 80%. The logic: rather than letting cities compete to bid and then be rejected by public opinion, the IOC should proactively talk to potential host cities and look for proposals with consensus.

But whether the reforms can reverse the trend remains doubtful. Gaffney, a scholar at the University of Zurich, points out that people in developed countries generally believe the Olympics benefit only businesspeople and the IOC, while all costs are borne by taxpayers in the host city. The IOC controls brand and broadcast revenue, while operational costs and overrun risks are pushed onto the host. That asymmetry drives the backlash.

Wegner called it “a sad day for Berlin” and accused the Left Party of “wiping the entire bid off the table in 45 seconds,” leaving sports federations uncertain. But those 45 seconds exposed a more basic problem: the fate of a city-level project lasting more than two years and involving billions of euros in public funds should never have depended on the electoral fortunes of one party coalition. The bid was fragile because it never seriously put the question “are residents willing?” on the table and answered it.

On August 1, 1936, Hitler declared the Berlin Olympics open at the Berlin Olympic Stadium. On September 24, 2026, Wegner announced in Berlin that the bid was withdrawn. Ninety years separated the two.