join celebrations, an invitation later canceled. In late 1988, Diepgen called a state election on relatively short notice, hoping to capitalize on his personal popularity and to pre-empt an assault on the Christian Democrats over local problems such as a housing shortage and unpopular national policies, including proposed changes in the health service. When the results came in on 29 January 1989, the centre-right coalition led by Eberhard Diepgen lost its majority. Although the CDU was just able to assert itself as the strongest party, the FDP failed, however, at the five percent hurdle. When efforts to form a grand coalition were unsuccessful, the SPD top candidate Walter Momper formed a government alliance with the Alternative List (AL), which had achieved a double-digit result for the first time. The CDU went into opposition, and Eberhard Diepen returned to the position of leader of the opposition. Unified With the re-unification of Germany in October 1990, East and West Berlin re-united and the four-power status of the city expired. The first state elections of the united Berlin took place on 2 December 1990 and resulted in the CDU reasserting itself as the strongest party with 40.3 percent of the vote. As the former CDU-FDP coalition were three short of a majority, Diepgen formed a grand coalition with the SPD. On 24 January 1991, the Abgeordnetenhaus elected Diepgen as governing mayor.ref></ref> Diepgen immediately initiated the relocation of the seat of the governing mayor and the Senate Chancellery from Schöneberg to Berlin's town hall in the Mitte district. The move of the Bundestag and Federal Government to Berlin also fell into his second term of office. Interestingly, Berlin was among the states that voted in 1991 to keep the Bundesrat, in Bonn, despite the decision to move the Bundestag and most government agencies to Berlin; the Bundesrat was eventually moved to the new capital. Also in 1991, Diepgen ordered the removal of a 3.5-tonne sculpture of Lenin, wanting to rid the city of an icon of a "dictatorship where people were persecuted and murdered." In May 1996, Diepgen – together with the Federal Minister of Transport Matthias Wissmann and the Minister-President of Brandenburg Manfred Stolpe – committed to Schönefeld as the site for the new Berlin Brandenburg Airport on 28 May 1996. This so-called consensus decision was later affirmed by the respective state legislatures. In 1996, Diepgen also campaigned in favor of the ultimately