Ferenc Gyurcsány
The ruling Fidesz party and right-wing media kept up the pressure this week on former Socialist prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, who is battling accusations that he resorted to plagiarism to graduate from university in the 1980s.
Fidesz asked on Saturday when Gyurcsány will realise that “it is over”, and demanded answers to “basic” questions. “How is it that he submitted a dissertation in 1984 with the same title as that of his brother-in-law in 1980?” party spokeswoman Gabriella Selmeczy asked.
Independent commercial station ATV sought to provide an answer on Tuesday, when it reported it has uncovered numerous cases of dissertations with identical or very similar titles in the university archives – albeit without the family connection.
The same broadcaster, seen as left-liberal, suggested that pro-government news channel HírTV had manipulated an interview with a retired headmaster to support its case against the former premier. HírTV reported last Friday that Gyurcsány, then a leader of communist youth league KISZ, had been exempted from undertaking compulsory classroom practice while studying for a teaching degree.
However, the former head teacher of a school in the southern city of Pécs told ATV that HírTV had misrepresented him, and expressed outrage over being filmed secretly. “They did not even say that they were from HírTV,” János Jedlicska said.
The allegations come in the wake of the resignation of president of the republic Pál Schmitt amid revelations that most of a doctoral thesis he submitted in the early 1990s was copied from published works by foreign scholars. Reporters promptly turned their attentions to the academic credentials of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his arch rival Gyurcsány.
While the former responded by posting his undergraduate dissertation online, Gyurcsány was unable to find his own work on winemaking in the Lake Balaton region. Furthermore, a copy had mysteriously disappeared from the archives at the University of Pécs, a fact for which each side blames the other and is now the subject of a police probe.
