Chancellor Angela Merkel granted Turkey’s request to prosecute a German satirist who derided President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a decision that exposed a rift in her government and risked a backlash among the German public over press freedoms. The episode, which began with a lewd joke directed at Erdogan on national television last month, lays bare the pitfalls in Germany’s dependence on Turkish help to tackle the region’s worst refugee crisis since the second world war. While Merkel left the legal fate of the comedian, Jan Boehmermann, in the hands of the country’s courts, she said her government would seek to scrap the law in Germany’s criminal code that penalises insults against a foreign head of state. “In a state governed by the rule of law, it’s not the domain of the government, but rather the prosecutors and the courts, to weigh individual rights,” Merkel told reporters in Berlin, reading from a prepared statement. Prosecution of satire because of lèse-majesté is not compatible with democracy Thomas Opermann, SPD parliamentary caucus leader The chancellor both lauded Germany’s cooperation with Turkey and condemned its government’s crackdown on media organisations as a matter of great concern. The decision blew open a divide in her Christian Democratic-led government, with ministers among the junior partner Social Democrats dissenting, just one day after announcing an agreement on refugees meant to end bickering over the matter within her coalition. Merkel took the final decision herself to allow the probe after failing to win consensus with the SPD. “I believe this decision is wrong,” SPD parliamentary caucus leader Thomas Opermann told reporters. “Prosecution of satire because of lèse-majesté is not compatible with democracy.” The furore has centred on Boehmermann, a comedian with public broadcaster ZDF who two weeks ago recited a poem about Erdogan that plumbed the depths of bawdiness in an effort to test the boundaries of acceptable satire under a law protecting foreign heads of state from libel. Merkel says her decision was not a prejudgment on the satirist’s culpability. Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said on Monday that the German comedian had committed a “crime against humanity” by insulting the Turkish head of state. “No one has the right to insult [Erdogan],” Kurtulmus told reporters. Erdogan himself also filed a complaint with German prosecutors seeking legal action. Boehmermann’s poem was a response to the Turkish government’s complaints over an earlier German television satire criticising Erdogan’s human-rights record.
