A deeply embarrassed Angela Merkel has been caught between a rock and a hard place. Stateswoman or politician?
Either the chancellor apparently acquiesced in an insult to Turkey's head of state, President Erdogan, whose support she and the EU have been assiduously courting over refugees. Or she alienated political support across the board by approving an investigation of comedian Jan Böhmermann by the prosecuting authorities for an obscure offence of insulting a foreign head of state, equivalent to "lèse majesté", that no-one believes should still be on the statute books.
Yesterday, stateswoman, she approved the investigation, while insisting that to do otherwise would have been to encroach improperly on prosecutorial discretion.
Böhmermann had used his satirical TV programme to air "Smear Poem" which accused the Turkish president of, among other things, "repressing minorities, kicking Kurds and slapping Christians while watching child porn".
His purpose – no apologies – to insult Erdogan and poke fun at his thin-skinned approach to criticism – the latter since taking office in 2014 has filed a record 1,845 court cases against individuals for insulting him, resulting in a more than a dozen sentences.
The German government is now committed to amending paragraph 103 of the 1871 criminal code, until now a rarely used curious oddity. But too late for Mr Böhmermann.
Few imagine, however, that the court, if it ends up there, will be severe, and he can take comfort from an important 2002 ruling of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), Colombani and others v France, which will certainly overturn any conviction.
Two Le Monde journalists had been fined for publicly insulting a foreign head of state, King Hassan II of Morocco, by implying his entourage was implicated in drug trafficking. The ECHR found that the conviction "incontestably amounted to an interference with the applicants' exercise of their right to freedom of expression" as guaranteed by Article 10 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Watch this space, Mr Erdogan.