Comic who mocked Erdogan bides time on show

Berlin: The satirist whose crude lampoon of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey touched off a furore over free speech in Germany announced on Saturday that he and his team would take a break from their satirical TV show until May 12.

The announcement, made on Facebook by public service broadcaster ZDF and comedian Jan Bohmermann, seemed intended to tamp down a nationwide debate that erupted two weeks ago after Bohmermann broadcast a lewd poem about Erdogan. The comic has said the verses were a deliberate criticism of the Turkish leader.

Bohmermann, 35, set off a controversy, putting at its centre two of the world’s most prominent leaders: Erdogan, who has previously sued nearly 2,000 Turks, alleging that they insulted him, and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who last month reached a deal with Erdogan to stanch the influx of refugees into Europe.

Merkel came under fire after her spokesman said she had agreed that the poem was deliberately hurtful. Critics said she had taken the position out of a concern that Erdogan would not keep his end of the bargain and that more refugees would arrive en masse.

On Friday, the chancellor said she would permit Erdogan to pursue a lawsuit in Germany under an obscure 1871 law that governs the handling of insults of foreign heads of state. While most mainstream German news media outlets agreed that the move would put the affair where it belonged – in court – Merkel’s coalition government was split over the issue. Other Germans, who have rallied to the popular Bohmermann, accused the chancellor of failing to defend free speech.

Merkel said the outdated law would soon be repealed, and most legal experts doubt that Bohmermann risks going to prison.

The comic had cancelled his weekly show on Thursday, but said on Saturday that he would take a longer break. On Facebook, he said that for three years he had satirised the top issues in politics, the arts and the tabloids. Having become the story in all three of those worlds, he said, “I decided to take a short break from TV, so that the public here and the internet can go back to the really important things like the refugee crisis, cat videos and the love lives” of actresses.

Bohmermann has attracted millions of viewers on the Web for his razor sharp music videos. He said he had felt an outpouring of support “from Saarland to Saxony from the overwhelming majority who are not President Erdogan, and for that I would like to thank everyone from my heart”.

Bohmermann, who has been living under police protection since receiving threats from Turkish nationalists over the incident, said he intended to travel, and joked that he might go to North Korea to study up on press freedom, or take a Segway along a well-known pilgrimage route in Spain “to find myself”.