Angela Merkel bows to pressure from Turkey by agreeing to prosecute comedian who insulted President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
The decision blew open a divide in her Christian Democratic-led government, with ministers among the junior partner Social Democrats dissenting.
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
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.