GERMANY – Chancellor Angela Merkel has made a “big mistake” by failing to support freedom of the press in the scandal over a poem insulting the Turkish President, Germany’s top satirist said on Tuesday. “It was a big mistake that is hopefully causing her pain,” Oliver Welke, presenter of Friday-night satirical news show “heute show”, told Bild.

The government is battling through a lose-lose situation where it risks appearing to undermine press freedom or gravely insulting a key foreign ally in Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan initially took umbrage against German TV comedians when satire show Extra 3 broadcast a song accusing him of crushing democratic protests and press freedoms. The Turkish government demanded that the song be taken offline and never broadcast again.(thelocal.de)…[+]