The journalist and lawyer Ulrike Demmer Foto will be the new director of the Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg RBB.
(Photo: IMAGO/epd; AndreasxFischer)
Potsdam The former deputy government spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer was the only remaining candidate to be elected as the new director of Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB). The broadcasting council of the crisis-ridden ARD station voted in Potsdam on Friday for the 50-year-old to succeed interim boss Katrin Vernau.
RBB announced that Demmer was elected with the necessary two-thirds majority of 24 members of the Broadcasting Council present. The 30-strong Broadcasting Council is one of the two control bodies of the public RBB. Former Vodafone manager Heide Baumann, who initially stood as an opposing candidate, withdrew her candidacy after two ballots.
Demmer, who was elected for a five-year term, has to implement a 49 million savings program and continue to work through the consequences of the almost year-old scandal surrounding allegations of nepotism against former director Patricia Schlesinger. It is important to strengthen the scratched image of the station again. From 2016 to 2021, Demmer was deputy spokeswoman for Angela Merkel’s previous black-red federal government.
The election on Friday was preceded by a fuss about the list of candidates. Before Heide Baumann, two other applicants had already withdrawn. Initially, Juliane Leopold, editor-in-chief of digital news from ARD-aktuell (“Tagesschau”, “Tagesthemen”), canceled. One day before the election, the program director of Radio Bremen, Jan Weyrauch, surprisingly gave up his ambitions.
He feared that after the election there would have been no agreement in negotiations on the director’s contract, even if he had been willing to accept compromises. The application process was accompanied by a debate on plans in the board of directors to significantly reduce top salaries in the future. This was also communicated to the applicants.
RBB in crisis
Immediately before the election, the staff council and the freelance representatives of the ARD broadcaster called for a new application process against the background of Leopold and Weyrauch’s withdrawals. An orderly election procedure could no longer be brought to an end, the two representations announced.
When WDR manager Vernau from Cologne took over the post as interim boss in autumn 2022, she found RBB in a state of emergency. The medium-sized ARD broadcaster with more than 3,000 employees and an annual broadcasting contribution budget of almost 450 million euros fell into a deep crisis in the summer of 2022 when allegations against the broadcaster boss Schlesinger, who was later fired without notice, and the resigned head of the RBB supervisory board, Wolf -Dieter Wolf, both rejected. The public prosecutor’s office in Berlin is still investigating, so long as the presumption of innocence applies.
Vernau himself had not applied for the position of director and was therefore not subsequently included on the list of candidates. Although she had not applied, she made it clear that she would continue in the post.
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