Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (left) and Pál Schmitt leave the chamber after Schmitt resigned as President of the Republic on Monday. Four days earlier he was stripped of his doctorate over a thesis that was determined to be 90 per cent the work of others. He plans to sue the university.(foto:MTI Beliczay Laszlo)
President Pál Schmitt tendered his resignation on Monday to the Parliament that elected him. The end came four days after being stripped of his doctorate amid an embarrassing plagiarism scandal.
His alma mater, Budapest’s Semmelweis Medical University, ruled last Thursday that Schmitt’s 1992 doctoral dissertation met neither ethical nor academic norms. This was two days after a fact-finding committee – despite controversially absolving Schmitt of blame – established that over 90 per cent of the 215-page thesis had been copied from the works of other academics.
Didn’t read writing on the wall
However, Schmitt’s first reaction was defiant and in an extraordinary interview on public-service television last Friday he refused to step down. The former fencing champion claimed to have written the disputed analysis of the Olympics in good faith, and like four of five committee members blamed university examiners for his predicament. He also vowed to write a new dissertation on sport and environmental protection.
Orbán’s man
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said over the weekend that the choice of whether to go must lie with Schmitt because the Constitution holds the post of president as “inviolable”.
Schmitt, 69, was appointed in 2010 by the freshly elected Fidesz-Christian Democrat alliance with the personal backing of Orbán.
Despite the latter’s deferral to the Constitution, Parliament has the power to remove a president via a two-thirds majority vote, as enjoyed by the governing alliance.
Opposition parties from left and right were applying unrelenting pressure on Schmitt and the conservative government at home, while yet another Hungarian controversy made it into European and global news reports. On Monday the International Olympic Committee announced that it will examine the case and decide whether to take action against him.
