One does not know exactly what drove Wolfgang Kubicki to do so, perhaps it was the poor poll numbers of his FDP before the Lower Saxony elections. In any case, the Bundestag Vice President thought it was a good idea to insult Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as a “little sewer rat” during the election campaign in Hildesheim. Erdoğan did what he often does in such cases. Through his lawyer Mustafa Kaplan, he filed a criminal complaint for insult and defamation at the Hildesheim public prosecutor’s office. Meanwhile, Turkey summoned the German ambassador.
Kubicki versus Erdoğan is reminiscent of the Turkish president’s legally momentous dispute with Jan Böhmermann. In 2016, the TV presenter wrote a nasty diatribe about Erdoğan, which he dressed up as satirical. Because the president had reacted angrily to another satire in the program Extra 3, Böhmermann pretended to show him didactically what was happening in Germany Not may. Namely, publicly reciting a poem with such nasty insults as Böhmermann was now reciting publicly. A satirical disclaimer if you will; “He likes to fuck goats best,” declaimed Böhmermann.
A matter of context
The judiciary did not share Böhmermann’s humor and did not believe that satire allowed what would otherwise be forbidden. The regional and higher regional courts in Hamburg banned several passages of the poem, while the Federal Constitutional Court agreed with the lower courts. Incidentally, the old-fashioned paragraph on “Insults to Majesty” was removed from the penal code.
Kubicki was reported because of a normal insult. So is it a crime to call a less squeamish president a “little sewer rat”?
Lawyers first look at the context. Kubicki had apparently spoken about the fact that Erdoğan had concluded a deal with the European Union that was advantageous for Turkey to reduce the number of refugees in refugee policy. As an explanation for his drastic choice of words, Kubicki stated that a sewer rat is a “small, cute, but also clever and devious creature”, also known from children’s stories such as “Kalle Kanalratte” and “Ratatouille”.
The lawyer Kubicki should not only have thought of de-escalation. In the case of verbal attacks, the Federal Constitutional Court always looks for an interpretation that is favorable in terms of freedom of expression. Here it could read: Erdogan acts particularly tricky in refugee policy, just like a devious sewer rat. One of the permitted passages in Böhmermann’s poem read: “He is the man who hits girls while wearing rubber masks.” According to the court, the line reminded of police violence against young demonstrators.
Nevertheless, “sewer rat” should be borderline, because the word sounds very much like personal defamation. The case law sometimes also accepts drastic expressions; Border guards were sometimes called “man hunters”.