If the Federal Constitutional Court sticks to its previous broadcasting jurisprudence, the directors of the public broadcasters can put the champagne in the cold. Because then the constitutional judges will uphold the complaint against the blockade of the increase in the radio license fee from 17.50 euros to 18.36 euros per month on Thursday, which they have issued as mandatory. Since this was due on January 1st of this year, it could even be that Karlsruhe will award the institutions compensation for the increase that has not occurred since then. This would add to the income of almost exactly eight billion euros from last year's contribution. Since the premium increase should bring the broadcasters around 1.5 billion euros in addition for the period from 2021 to 2024 (they had asked for three billion),the contributors are threatened with a hefty bill.

Michael Hanfeld

responsible editor for features online and "media".

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As is well known, the proceedings were halted by the re-elected Prime Minister of Saxony-Anhalt, Reiner Haseloff (CDU). In order to save his Kenya coalition with the SPD and the Greens, he did not submit the state media treaty, which formulated the premium increase, to the state parliament for a vote at the end of November last year. The SPD and the Greens wanted to agree, but Haseloff had to fear that members of the CDU parliamentary group would reject the state treaty, which would have failed because of their resistance and that of the AfD. The public broadcasters lodged a constitutional complaint against this step. The Federal Constitutional Court rejected your application for an urgent decision because of a lack of justification. However, this does not mean anything for the judgment that is now pending.

Rather, one can expect that the judges will confirm the all-encompassing position as a guarantor of freedom of expression to public broadcasting, which has always been part of the Karlsruhe jurisprudence.

It began with the first broadcasting judgment in 1961, in which the judges ruled that public broadcasting in the Federal Republic is a matter for the federal states.

It continued in the 1980s with rulings on the admissibility of private broadcasting and the “dual” broadcasting system, which, according to the court, is based on the idea of ​​“basic provision” with information, education, culture and entertainment through public broadcasting.

Accordingly, the broadcasters are, so to speak, the foundation of radio and press freedom in this country.

Political and “remote from the state”, please

In addition, decisions were made in the nineties that formulated the financing and the political and state-independent financing system of public broadcasters as constitutive for public broadcasting. In 2007 the Federal Constitutional Court emphasized that the federal states must not deviate from the recommendation of the Commission for the Determination of Financial Requirements (KEF) for political reasons, which recommends the level of the license fee - today the license fee.