Marinella Soldi, 54 years old, from Figline Valdarno near Florence, sits in a madhouse. She has already moved into the office on the 7th and top floor at Viale Mazzini 14 in Rome. Soldi has been elected as the new president of Rai, Italy’s public broadcaster. And maybe you have to understand the slogan on her LinkedIn profile as an indication that she knows what she is getting into, it’s a shortened quote from Charles Darwin: “Not the strongest survive, but those who are best at change to adjust …”
The Rai has always served the political parties in Italy as a benefit barn and post bazaar. It was therefore always difficult for apolitical managers like Soldi to make a career at Rai. Even the best fell victim to the parties’ calculations and grotesque bargaining. Almost everything about the Rai is politics, right down to the programs. Rai Uno and its daily news, the TG1, is usually close to the government, for several decades it was called: Democrazia Cristiana. Rai Due and TG2 are traditionally to the right, Rai Tre and TG3 to the left. In total, the opinion channels should be distributed fairly, which of course only works reasonably well.
In 2015 she proposed Matteo Renzi for the presidency
Soldi was now a candidate for the top for the second time: in 2015, then Prime Minister Matteo Renzi had proposed her for the presidency. And as then, there was again a lot of resentment in the responsible parliamentary commission. The post-fascists and the Cinque Stelle in particular thought they would be ignored. However, this has nothing to do with Marinella Soldi’s profile. Nobody doubts its suitability, it is supposed to dust off the grandmother’s Rai and modernize it.
Soldi is considered a cosmopolitan, she speaks four languages. When she was eight, her family moved to London, where she grew up. She studied economics at the London School of Economics, completed an MBA in Paris and then worked for the consulting firm McKinsey for a few years. But it would have been her real dream for the big business paper The Economist to write, as she said in an interview. Instead, she found her way to the media at the music channel MTV, where she held many high positions when she was young. When she became a mother at 30, she started her own company and coached executive staff.
It made the third largest pole out of a small pay-TV reality like “Discovery”
In 2009, the American company Discovery took on her as Managing Director for Southern Europe. At that time, Discovery was a small pay-TV reality in Italy, hidden in the back positions of the broadcasting slots. Soldi moved the platform to digital terrestrial television, bought additional channels and launched his own productions. Discovery now has seven free TV channels and six pay-TV channels in Italy, making it the third largest pole next to Rai and Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset. Her merits were so highly valued by the parent headquarters in New York that Soldi became head of the network’s entire European business. The seat was therefore moved to Milan.
Soldi is the election of Mario Draghi, the non-party prime minister of Italy. Draghi’s stated goal is to place people with merit and expertise at as many heads of the state apparatus as possible. Ideally, those without a party book and political commitments – for change.