Brexit leader Johnson wins 'insulting Erdogan poetry prize'

Leading Brexit campaigner Boris Johnson has won a British prize that called for rude poems about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in solidarity with a German comedian facing prosecution for doing the same.

The Conservative lawmaker, the former mayor of London seen as a possible successor to Prime Minister David Cameron, won the prize for a limerick about a "young fellow from Ankara" who "sowed his wild oats / With the help of a goat / But he didn't even stop to thankera."

The Spectator magazine set up the informal £1,000 ($1,465, 1,306-euro) "President Erdogan Insulting Poetry Competition" last month.

"If somebody wants to make a joke about the love that flowers between the Turkish president and a goat, he should be able to do so, in any European country, including Turkey," Johnson told Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche.

He said it was a "scandal" that German comedian Jan Boehmermann is facing possible criminal proceedings in Germany for a 24-line poem that accused Erdogan of bestiality and paedophilia.

Under a rarely-enforced German law, insulting organs or representatives of foreign states can be punishable by up to three years in prison.

Erdogan has come in for fierce Western criticism of late over his increasingly authoritarian rule.

But the move against Boehmermann, which was authorised by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, sparked a domestic row over freedom of speech and has soured relations between Berlin and Ankara.

Handing the prize to Johnson will provoke criticisms of an inside job as Johnson is a former Spectator editor.

The magazine writer and author who came up with the prize admitted his decision was all about making a statement.

"I think it a wonderful thing that a British political leader has shown that Britain will not bow before the putative Caliph in Ankara," Douglas Murray wrote.

Britain votes on June 23 in a referendum on whether to stay in or leave the European Union.

Source :AFP