German press lambasts 'embarrassing' Netzpolitik row

The row between chief prosecutor Harald Range (l) and Justice Minister Heiko Maas (r) has filled column inches in the German press for over nearly a week

The sacking of Germany's top prosecutor over a controversial treason investigation into a politics blog has left commentators shaking their heads at a convoluted saga they believe has turned into an embarrassment for the entire political establishment.

Harald Range was dismissed after accusing his boss, Justice Minister Heiko Maas, of "intolerable interference" for requesting that he drop an independent expert from the inquiry into Netzpolitik.org. The expert concluded that the website had revealed state secrets in one of its articles.

Writing in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Robert Rossmann thinks Mr Maas had no choice but to dismiss Mr Range, as failing to respond to what was effectively a "challenge to sack him" would have left the minister's credibility in tatters.

But he also castigates the wider failure to stop the "fiasco" of the Netzpolitik.org investigation, despite several officials knowing about it for a long time.

"The Netzpolitik affair has revealed a case of multiple political failure," he writes. "The chancellor's office, the interior ministry and the justice ministry have all made fools of themselves."

Joerg Diehl in Der Spiegel, agrees that Mr Maas had to sack the prosecutor, but criticises the abrupt manner of the dismissal as "undeserved".

He adds that the two men's conflict is not just about a personal disagreement, but also about the "difficult relationship between politics and state prosecutors, about the question as to how far ministries should be allowed to, able to or required to intervene in criminal investigations".

The two journalists under investigation have called for the case to be dropped

"Don't mess with the internet," reads the headline of an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that casts the story as a success for internet freedom campaigners who have made Netzpolitik.org something of a cause celebre.

'Silly season'

But a commentary in the same paper argues that Justice Minister Heiko Maas's intervention in the prosecutors' investigation against Netzpolitik is an act worthy of a "banana republic".

His order to drop the independent expert on the material published by the website, Reinhard Mueller writes, "confirms the worst kind of prejudices about the exertion of political influence on criminal proceedings, as if saying: 'It's up to me to decide what is a punishable offence.'"

For Die Welt commentator Ulf Poschardt, the politicians and officials involved in the saga are all equally responsible for creating an unnecessary "embarrassing piece of silly season theatre" out of thin air.

"The skirmish between Justice Minister Heiko Maas and Prosecutor-General Harald Range is evidence of a lack of professionalism on everyone's part," he writes. "In the end, almost everyone lost."

The exception, he adds, is Netzpolitik.org itself, which "could not have wished for a better advert for its product than this self-inflicted crisis of state on the empty stage of the silly season theatre".

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