Hertha BSC wants to elect a new president: Former Ultra against "Kennedy von der Spree"

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Presidential candidate Frank Steffel

Photo: imago sport photo service / imago/Camera 4

Berlin is rehearsing the future these days.

The German Athletics Championships, running, jumping and throwing, take place in the Olympic Stadium.

After all, Bundesliga football should hardly be seen here at some point.

Hertha BSC wants to leave the Olympic Stadium as soon as possible, the location for the new arena in the immediate vicinity seems to have been found.

After years of back and forth, the Senate and the club could reach agreement on a new building.

Seems and could, these are the terms that you always have to use in Berlin when it comes to building projects.

Incidentally, one of the consultants for the stadium project is the former head of BER, Engelbert Lütke Daldrup.

Era Gegenbauer is over

But first Hertha wants to close a first large vacant lot this Sunday.

The club elects a new president.

Because so much is associated with excitement at Hertha, this election is also peppered with all kinds of emotions in advance.

And whether a construction site will actually be completed on Sunday or rather a new one will be opened again is completely open.

After 14 years at the top of the club, Werner Gegenbauer announced his resignation last month, most recently worn down by criticism and allegations.

In this case one can actually speak of the end of an era;

when Gegenbauer took office in 2008, Hertha was just starting to become a top club under Lucien Favre.

Instead, two descents followed, two ascents, there was always something going on.

The protagonists changed, Gegenbauer stayed.

Recently, however, the president and investor Lars Windhorst had become irretrievably wedged, the conflict between the two had long since begun to paralyze the club.

Voting motions for the general meeting were already in the drawer.

The multi-entrepreneur Gegenbauer, who was accused of running Hertha as if the club were also one of his companies, forestalled this.

A cracking dualism

On Sunday it's about his successor, and there's now a lot of talk in the Berlin media about the "showdown" between the two most promising applicants.

But the temptation is too great to do without the bold headlines.

"Former Ultra" versus "Kennedy von der Spree" is hard to miss as a cracking dualism.

On the one hand, the 41-year-old Kay Bernstein, owner of a communications and event agency, who once whipped up the Hertha ultra-group Harlekins in the east curve, is applying.

He makes no secret of this, on the contrary: that's his pound, so he can present himself as the representative of the fans.

On the other side stands Frank Steffel.

In 2001 he had unsuccessfully applied as the CDU's top candidate for the office of governing mayor. The Spree-Kennedy label came from that time, and he hasn't gotten rid of it to this day, just like Hertha can't get rid of the "Big City Club" label.

For many years Steffel sat for the district of Reinickendorf and for the CDU in the Bundestag, for a few years longer he headed the handball Bundesliga team Füchse Berlin.

All in all, more old West Berlin is hardly imaginable.

The benevolence of Windhorst

Steffel is thriving with his many years of experience as Foxes club boss, with the contacts he has built up over time in politics and business.

It is no secret that he is also the applicant who is most likely to have investor Windhorst's goodwill.

But maybe this is all his problem.

Steffel jumped on the candidate carousel just two weeks ago at the instigation of the new supervisory board chairman Klaus Brüggemann, at a time when Bernstein's application had been certain for months.

Brüggemann had combed through a list of prominent club members and came across Steffel's name.

The 56-year-old CDU politician behaves as the applicant who wants to fill in the rifts of the past in the club, so to speak as the consensus candidate of all Hertha.

Steffel has offered Bernstein to work on his team in exchange for a fight candidacy.

Bernstein refused, for him Steffel does not stand for the new beginning that the club needs.

Who mobilizes best?

The outcome of the election is open, it probably also depends on who can best mobilize his supporters on Sunday.

Steffel knows the good, old Berlin establishment is behind him, Hertha veteran Pál Dárdai, who hardly appeared in public after leaving as coach in the fall, recently campaigned for Steffel with a video on Twitter.

At the same time, the politician is still struggling to win the hearts of Hertha fans.

Which has a lot to do with his past.

The politician is a well-known figure in Berlin, but one who is also often ridiculed.

The old stories are now coming up again, how he once hid behind Edmund Stoiber when eggs and tomatoes flew out of the audience at a CDU rally on Alexanderplatz.

That he, as a CDU candidate for mayor of Berlin, declared Munich to be the secret capital of Germany, that he had disparagingly snarled ultras in the Bundestag and that he had made racist statements in his youth.

How he was stripped of his doctorate for obvious plagiarism, which at least puts him on an equal footing with the governing mayor in Berlin.

In 2001, DER SPIEGEL named him »Berlin's unshakable loser«.

All of these are not plus points.

In an interview with "Kicker" in the run-up to the election, Bernstein complained that the "egos and vanities in the club" were still too big.

But Hertha without egos and vanities?

That would actually be a fresh start – with whomever.