“For a political career, a doctorate is pointless”

Again a politician is said to have botched his doctoral thesis. But what does plagiarism actually say about political suitability? And about the university that accepted the work?

KWhen he was in office, the new Secretary General of the CSU, Martin Huber, was hit by what had happened to many of his fellow politicians before him: Huber was confronted with allegations of plagiarism against his dissertation. He submitted it to the Ludwig Maximilian University in 2007. The public has long had enough of the plagiarism stories. Because these now follow a fixed script. Following the allegation of plagiarism, the accused asserted that he had prepared his dissertation to the “best of my knowledge and belief”. The accused immediately dutifully asked the university for a second review of the dissertation, which awarded the doctoral degree. After years of review procedures, which were also prone to breakdowns, as in the case of Franziska Giffey at the Free University of Berlin, the responsible university hastened to ensure a speedy review.

Depending on the severity of the allegations, the responsible head of government then expresses his “complete trust” in the person who has been brought into trouble, which Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) has so far failed to do. At the latest when this sentence falls, the insured person can prepare for his imminent withdrawal. The cases of Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (CSU), Annette Schavan (CDU) and Franziska Giffey (SPD) have shown this. The administrative courts are not particularly impressed with the assurance that they have worked to the best of their knowledge and belief, as the decision of the Berlin Administrative Court in the plagiarism proceedings against the CDU politician Frank Steffel in 2020 showed.