Police remove banner insulting Friedrich Merz at TU Berlin

Police have removed a banner reading “Merz leck Eier” that students hung from the windows of the Technical University (TU) in Berlin. Many young people are testing the boundaries of Germany’s freedom of expression laws by publicly insulting Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU).

Police remove “Merz leck Eier” banner

Police in Berlin have removed a banner which students at TU Berlin hung from a campus building. The banner read “Merz leck Eier”, literally “Merz lick eggs” but colloquially “Merz lick balls”, alongside a drawing of some Easter eggs.

The banner was hung by students on the evening of Friday, March 27, and removed by police around 15 hours later on Saturday morning. “We consider this as a highly problematic move with regard to student self-governance and freedom of expression on campus", the EB 104 student organisation told taz. 

“Merz leck Eier” is a reference to a placard at a youth anti-conscription demonstration in early March. Police confiscated the placard from an 18-year-old man, who was briefly arrested, according to Junge Welt. According to Die Welt, the 18-year-old is now being investigated for “defamation and slander against public figures”.

Since the incident, the phrase has been regularly appearing online and on stickers, being chanted at demonstrations, and graffitied on the CDU party offices.

Merz is litigious against insults

It’s paragraph 188 of Germany’s criminal code, which protects politicians, public figures, or members of the public from defamation or slander, as well as from insults.

The law is invoked regularly, and very regularly by Merz. At the end of 2025, it became public that Merz alone had lodged over 100 such complaints since 2021.

One of the best-known cases of paragraph 188 being invoked involved a 64-year-old man who had his house searched by police after calling then-Finance Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) a “Schwachkopf” (moron). The so-called “Schwachkopf-Affäre” was the subject of a 2025 documentary of the same name.

Whether “Merz leck Eier” is considered defamation, slander, or protected by Germany’s freedom of expression laws remains to be seen.