German Chancellor Angela Merkel is trying to balance freedom of speech and diplomatic relations after Turkey asked her government to prosecute a TV comedian over a “smear poem” that criticized Turkish President Tayyip Recep Erdoğan.
Erdoğan’s government, which regularly shuts down access to social media and arrests journalists who dare to criticize the Turkish leader, is taking advantage of an obscure section of the German penal code to make Germany prosecute TV comic Jan Böhmermann.
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On a March 31 broadcast of his program Neo Magazin Royale, Böhmermann read a satirical poem that referred to the Turkish president as a “professional idiot” and, according to Radio Free Europe, suggested Erdoğan was a fan of bestiality.
The 35-year-old TV host also implied Erdoğan likes to “repress minorities, kick Kurds and beat Christians while watching child porn,” Germany’s DeutscheWelle reported.
Here’s why that is now Angela Merkel’s problem.
Paragraph 103 of the German Penal Code makes it a crime to insult “a foreign head of state or a member of government.” The offence is punishable with “a fine or imprisonment for up to three years.” A sentence could be as long as five years if there’s a conviction for slander.
Turkey made the request to the German Foreign Ministry last week, Anadolu Agency reported.
Legal experts describe the law as “antiquated” and one that is rarely used.
Turkey has its own law that forbids insulting the country’s president and, according to the Associated Press, as many as 1,845 cases “of people accused of insulting Erdoğan have been opened since he became president in 2014.
Germany takes press freedom very seriously and this has put Merkel in a bit of a predicament.
“I want to stress again what was stressed yesterday – we have the fundamental values in the constitution and that includes article 5, which is the freedom of opinion, freedom of science and of course, the freedom of art,” the Guardian reported the chancellor saying Monday.
Merkel did however say Böhmermann’s poem was a “deliberate insult” to the Turkish leader.
Merkel is being forced to choose between the country’s treasured press freedom and a deal with a key partner that would ease some of the political pressure that arose from the refugee crisis.
“She either loses face with Turkey or she loses face domestically if she agrees to prosecute Böhmermann,” media researcher Alexander Kissler told DW.
If Erdoğan were to back out of the deal with the European Union over the “smear poem” row, it could mean his country would back away from accepting migrants turned away from Greece.
Germany has resettled more Syrian refugees than any other country in the European Union — more than 1.1 million —but Merkel has come under fire domestically as a result, particularly from Germany’s far right.
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Other European leaders have weighed in on the row, including former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstatd, now a Member of the European Parliament, who suggested Erdoğan is using “refugees as a political weapon.”
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