Austrian Minister of Labor and Family Affairs, Christine Aschbacher, has resigned on allegations of plagiarism. When writing her master’s thesis at the University of Wiener Neustadt in 2006, she is said to have copied pieces of text without citing the source, quoted it incorrectly and did not have a good command of the German language. She herself denies that.
The accusations are made by media researcher Stefan Weber, also known in Austrian media as a ‘plagiarism hunter’. He says the thesis contains an unprecedented amount of gibberish, nonsense and plagiarism. More than a fifth of the text would have been transferred from other sources without citation, most notably from an article by Forbes.
Hostility
It is not the first time that Weber has criticized Minister Aschbacher. In May last year he also said that he had already discovered plagiarism in another thesis she had written while studying at the Technical University of Bratislava in Slovakia.
Minister Aschbacher denies that there was intent. “I have always written my work to the best of my ability to obtain academic degrees and relied on the assessment of renowned professors.” She does resign because she wants to protect her family and to prevent “further hostility, political agitation and insults”.
Chancellor Kurz supports his party member and writes on Twitter that he respects Aschbacher’s decision to resign. On Monday Kurz will nominate a successor.
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