International Politics

[benji]

The list of penalties for insulting people in Germany reads like a classic Mastercard advert. Displaying your middle finger to a fellow motorist: €600 to €4,000. Using the informal version of the word “you” to a police officer: €600. Calling someone a “wanker”: €1,000.

To all this, a growing number of Germans are inclined to add that upholding freedom of expression is priceless.

Unease at the country’s stringent laws governing abusive language and gestures has peaked this week after a radical right-wing journalist was given a suspended seven-month prison sentence for mocking Nancy Faeser, the centre-left interior minister.

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Last year, when the interior ministry published an innocuous social media video of Faeser holding up handwritten signs in support of Germany’s Jews, Bendels pounced, doctoring the image so that the minister’s message read: “I hate freedom of opinion.”



Faeser filed a criminal complaint. On Tuesday the district court in Bamberg, Bavaria, found Bendels guilty of “abuse, slander or defamation against persons in political life”.

He had, a spokeswoman for the court said, “deliberately set out an untrue factual claim”. A casual reader scrolling through Bendels’s profile on X would not recognise that the picture had been edited. It could not be treated as satire.

Insults deemed to damage the honour of another individual have been criminalised in the German world since at least as far back as the 18th century, when Prussian legislation covered more than 150 different kinds of defamation.

It was also illegal to be rude about foreign heads of state or diplomats until 2017, when the comedian Jan Böhermann caused a continental-scale commotion with a graphically disobliging satirical poem about President Erdogan of Turkey.

The specific law under which Bendels was prosecuted is a particular headache for the authorities. Paragraph 188 of the German criminal code was designed to give politicians special protection against verbal abuse and false claims with penalties as stiff as five years in prison for the most serious cases.

This was the provision under which a man from Kaiserslautern was fined last year for posting to his 417 friends on Facebook that the former chancellor Angela Merkel was a “stupid slag”.

Over the past few years cabinet ministers have used this mechanism on an industrial scale to report their critics to police, filing hundreds of criminal complaints.

In one of the most notorious recent cases, the vice-chancellor, Robert Habeck — a Green Party member — reported a man who had edited a picture of a Schwarzkopf shampoo bottle to imply that Habeck was a schwachkopf, or dunderhead. Police raided the man’s house and confiscated his tablet computer.