A German journalist has been handed a seven-month suspended prison sentence from a judge in Bamberg, Bavaria, for posting a meme mocking federal interior minister Nancy Faeser.
David Bendels is the editor-in-chief of Deutschland-Kurier, an online news portal closely affiliated with the right-wing Alternative for Germany party (AfD).
In February 2024, he posted a picture on X that showed Faeser holding up a poster that read “I hate freedom of opinion”.
Bendels had taken a picture of the minister holding a poster that actually read: “We remember” – in reference to the holocaust – and had then changed the wording digitally.
#Faeser HASST #Meinungsfreiheit! pic.twitter.com/O0Wr0dLpJb
— Deutschland Kurier (@Deu_Kurier) February 28, 2024
Judge Martin Waschner ruled that the post constituted “criminal defamation” and gave Bardels the suspended prison sentence on April 7.
It was not clear to see for an unknowing reader that the photo had been manipulated, the court said.
The trial was an appeal case launched by Bendels against a previous conviction for sharing the manipulated picture.
In November 2024, Bendels had been sentenced to an undisclosed fine in the thousands of euros.
The jail sentence was based on Article 188 of the German Penal Code, which was introduced in 2021 when a set of laws “against hate and hate speech” was passed under then-chancellor Angela Merkel of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
That made it a criminal offence publicly to insult a German politician and the ruling has been widely used by German politicians, particularly from the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Greens party, to target their critics.
In a case that gained particular attention in November 2024, German police raided the home of a man and his handicapped daughter after the man had shared an image online insinuating Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck of the Greens was a moron.
The Bamberg verdict has sparked outrage among commentators. A pundit from Liberal newspaper Die Welt called it “a judgment like from a dictatorship”.
Bendels said he would appeal the sentence. According to legal scholars he stood a good chance of having the case thrown out as the Bavarian superior courts generally interpreted Article 188 in a narrow sense.
Furthermore, Germany had a strong tradition of declaring satire permissible under artistic freedom. In a prominent case in 2012, an appeals court threw out a lawsuit brought by the Pope against a satirical magazine that had depicted the Pontifex as incontinent.
Faeser has a long history of citing the “fight against right-wing extremism” in her actions.
Among other things, she spearheaded initiatives to block AfD members’ bank accounts and confiscate their legally owned firearms and framed protests against repressive anti-Covid measures as “inimical to the constitution”.
In January 2025, it also became known that German police officers who join AfD could face the sack. As interior minister, Faeser was responsible for the police.
According to most observers, she is not expected to remain in office under the incoming CDU-SPD coalition government.
