A committee finds that the president was not to blame for copying other people's work

ANYONE seeking to understand contemporary Hungary could do worse than to take a look at the ongoing scandal around President Pál Schmitt's doctoral thesis. Mr Schmitt submitted his thesis, "Analysis of the Programme of the Modern Olympic Games", to the Budapest College of Physical Education in 1992, and received a summa cum laude grade. But in January hvg.hu, a news portal, accused him of having plagiarised substantial sections of his dissertation from a work by Nikolai Georgiev, a Bulgarian sports historian. Budapest's Semmelweis University (which has since absorbed the PE college) set up a committee to investigate the allegations. Mr Schmitt strongly protested his innocence, saying that his dissertation had been reviewed by a panel of history professors. He also acknowledged that he knew and had worked with Mr Georgiev, and that they had used the same sources. The committee's report is over 1,000 pages long, but it has released a three-page summary today. It states that 17 pages of Mr Schmitt's thesis were lifted wholesale from a paper written by Klaus Heineman, a German sports sociologist. A further 180 pages were partly copied from Mr Georgiev's work. The dissertation, the committee says, also lacks proper citations and a bibliography.

In most countries Mr Schmitt would now be writing his resignation letter (or at least finding one to copy). A year ago Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the highly regarded German defence minister, resigned in disgrace after having been stripped of his PhD for plagiarism.

But it does not work like that in Hungary. The committee found that even though Mr Schmitt had copied large chunks of other people's work and passed it off as his own, he should not be blamed. The problem lay rather with his supervisors, who did not do their jobs properly. Mr Schmitt's thesis met the formal requirements of the time. He will keep his degree.

The committee's ruling was greeted by widespread derision in Hungary. Semmelweis University, a once-respected international institution, has shown the courage of a mouse, say critics, and will see its reputation tarnished for the sake of preserving Mr Schmitt's image.

All four opposition parties have called on Mr Schmitt to resign. But the president's comrades in Fidesz, Hungary's ruling right-wing party, are standing by him. The matter is now closed, they say.

Viktor Orbán, Hungary's prime minister, promised last year that the era of the cosy insider was over. “Our homeland will no longer be a country without consequences”, he said, soon after winning a landslide two-thirds parliamentary majority. That does not appear to apply to the president.