RBB has a new director: Ulrike Demmer, who used to be deputy spokeswoman for the federal government, was elected to office by the Broadcasting Council. Previously, the only remaining opposing candidate, Heide Baumann, had withdrawn. Baumann received only one vote in the first and second ballot. However, such a large number of members of the Broadcasting Council voted neither for Demmer nor for Baumann that Demmer initially did not receive the required two-thirds majority in two ballots.
Heide Baumann was most recently a member of the management board of Vodafone Germany.
(Photo: Vodafone)
Demmer succeeds Katrin Vernau, who took over the post on an interim basis last September. Before Vernau, Patricia Schlesinger was director of Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg. Schlesinger had plunged the broadcaster into a serious crisis. The reason for this were allegations of corruption that became public last summer. She was also criticized for the costly renovation of the broadcasting executive floor, which is said to have cost up to 1.4 million euros. A luxury company car is also said to have been approved for her, which she was also allowed to use privately. In the meantime, the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office is investigating on suspicion of infidelity and taking advantage. Schlesinger was dismissed without notice in August 2022.
The election was chaotic – not only on the actual election day
Since then, the RBB has never really come to rest. The election of the artistic director was also chaotic: before the election could begin, the committee first argued about the procedure for almost two hours in a non-public session. After Baumann’s decline, there was apparently a very fundamental debate again. Representatives of the employees of the RBB had previously lodged a protest against the election process. In front of the broadcasting studio in Potsdam and in the meeting room where the Broadcasting Council met, employees demonstrated on Friday with notes that read “Cancel election” and “New tender now”.
Of a total of four applicants for the post of director, two had dropped out shortly before the election – interestingly enough, exactly those from ARD. Juliane Leopold, the editor-in-chief of digital affairs at ARD Aktuell, withdrew because she did not perceive her specialty, digital transformation, as the main topic at RBB. Jan Weyrauch, Radio Bremen’s program director, said the day before the election that he wasn’t available after all, this time it was about money. Weyrauch’s salary expectations do not match what the board of directors wants to offer.
In the background is the dispute about a cap on directors’ salaries based on ministerial salaries, which is currently being carried out in several federal states for the broadcasters based there. RBB has just weathered a scandal surrounding management’s hidden bonuses, and the broadcasting boards seemed determined to be pioneers in capping wages. However, there is currently no contractual basis for this, even if the states of Berlin and Brandenburg want to create a corresponding regulation quickly. The heads of the committees, who wanted to set salary limits for the candidates, were therefore accused of acting on their own authority or – even worse – of political compliance.