The former mayor of London Boris Johnson has won a poetry contest about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s crackdown on the media.
Johnson’s limerick was declared the winner of the Spectator magazine’s “President Erdoğan offensive poetry competition,” which was held following Erdoğan’s efforts to prosecute a German comedian’s “offensive” poem.
After receiving two formal complaints by the Turkish president, a court in the German city of Hamburg issued a preliminary injunction on Tuesday, banning republication of parts of a satirical poem by Jan Böhmermann, saying they amounted to libel of Erdoğan.
Johnson, whose great-grandfather was Turkish, called the German court’s ruling “a scandal.”
When German Chancellor Angella Merkel said she would allow prosecutors to investigate the case, Johnson said she had “numbly decided to kowtow to the demands of Erdoğan, a man who is engaged in a chilling suppression of Turkish freedom…