Sanremo, Council of State rejects appeals: the era of direct assignment to Rai ends

At the Ariston Theatre, the curtain falls on Rai's direct assignment of the Italian Song Festival. The Council of State has in fact rejected all the appeals presented for the organisation of Sanremo in the three-year period 2026-2028. Awaiting the motivations, in its ruling published on Thursday 29 May, the highest authority of administrative justice declared inadmissible the intervention of consumer associations and rejected in full the appeals presented by Rai, Rai Pubblicità and the Municipality of Sanremo itself against the judgement of the Liguria Regional Administrative Tribunal that had imposed the public tender for the assignment of the trademarks connected to the Festival, judging illegitimate the direct assignment to Rai for the 2024-2025 editions.

The decision now opens negotiations with Rai, the only one to have submitted an offer by the 19 May deadline. The negotiations will be based on the criteria set out in the expression of interest, including economic and organisational obligations. However, the submission of a single offer does not imply automatic acceptance of the proposed conditions. The municipality could try to obtain better conditions by taking advantage of the negotiation resulting from the confirmed legitimacy of the public procedure. But Rai could also reduce the claims of the municipal administration due to economic sustainability or contractual limitations.

The case had started in December last year, when the Regional Administrative Court of Liguria rejected the direct awarding to RAI of the 5 million Italian Song Festival and, for the first time, opened the door to the possibility of going to tender. The appeal before the Regional Administrative Court had been filed by JE - a music publishing and events production company - that had previously sent the Sanremo municipality an expression of interest 'to acquire the ownership of the rights of economic and commercial exploitation of the Sanremo Festival'.

A subsequent request for a suspension of the sentence, on the part of RAI, was again rejected by the Council of State. Meanwhile, at the same time, the game on the future of the Festival began: at the beginning of April, the Council of the Ligurian municipality, led by the mayor Allessandro Mager, published the call for tenders to identify the TV partner for 2026, 2027 and 2028, plus a possible extension of a maximum of two years, as per the provisions of the sentence of the Liguria Regional Administrative Court.

A call for bids evidently on the upside, with the new partner called upon to pay the municipality a fee of no less than 6.5 million per year, in addition to a percentage of no less than one per cent on all income from advertising revenues and the exploitation of the brands granted. The move has created a certain amount of embarrassment in the Rai household, if we consider that the State TV has responded with a warning: the festival trademarks are inseparably linked to the Rai format and, therefore, under no circumstances can they be used by other television broadcasters, according to the thesis expressed by Viale Mazzini.