Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevicius has been given six months to amend his doctoral dissertation after a university found five instances of plagiarism, highlighting the difficulties of holding senior politicians in Central and Eastern Europe accountable for academic misconduct.
The ethics commission of ISM University of Management and Economics in Vilnius identified five instances of plagiarism and two further cases of improper text use that fell short of plagiarism in Sinkevicius's 2015 doctoral dissertation on alcohol consumption, according to a decision adopted on October 26.
The university has ordered him to correct the dissertation within six months. The amended work will be reviewed by the doctoral committee and published alongside a supplement detailing the changes. If Sinkevicius fails to comply, the university could initiate proceedings to withdraw his degree, Lithuanian news agency BNS and public broadcaster LRT reported on October 30.
"I conducted the data analysis and formulated the conclusions myself. Therefore, I have never doubted my work, but I do not dispute the violations identified," Sinkevicius told BNS.
The controversy emerged on social media in July, weeks after parliament backed the Social Democrat leader as prime minister on June 30. ISM initially said it trusted its examiners and would not reopen the dissertation. On July 31, however, its ethics commission agreed to investigate a complaint submitted by Lithuania's Office of the Ombudsperson for Academic Ethics and Procedures.
Sinkevicius's case is the latest in a succession of academic integrity scandals involving presidents, prime ministers and ministers across the region. Over the past 15 years, politicians in at least 10 other countries have faced allegations of copying academic work.
Some have resigned, while others have retained their positions and qualifications despite findings of misconduct. Universities, ethics bodies and courts have frequently struggled to impose sanctions, with political intervention, legal challenges and restrictions on retrospective degree withdrawals complicating enforcement.
The politicians who resigned
Hungary's former president Pal Schmitt remains one of the most prominent political casualties of a plagiarism scandal.
A university investigation in March 2012 found that over 200 of the 215 pages of his 1992 doctoral dissertation had been translated word for word from other authors' work. The university withdrew his doctorate.
Schmitt initially refused to resign, blaming the examiners who had approved his dissertation. Demonstrators called him the "Photocopier of the nation". He stepped down after the controversy prompted dissent within then prime minister Viktor Orban's Fidesz party and criticism from academics and the far-right Jobbik party.
In the Czech Republic, Prime Minister Andrej Babis's government lost two ministers in 2018 over allegations of academic copying.
Justice Minister Tatana Mala resigned after 13 days in office following allegations that passages in her two theses had been copied without attribution. Labour Minister Petr Krcal quit a week later after an expert at Prague's University of Economics estimated that around 75% of his bachelor's thesis had been copied.
Slovenian Education Minister Klavdija Markez lasted just five days before resigning over her master's thesis.
Austria's labour minister Christine Aschbacher resigned in January 2021 after allegations that both her master's and doctoral dissertations contained plagiarised material. She had completed her doctorate in Slovakia while serving in the Austrian government.
Romania's recurring scandals
Romania has experienced a particularly persistent series of controversies involving senior officials and academic qualifications.
In 2012, the journal Nature reported that Prime Minister Victor Ponta had copied substantial parts of his law doctorate, supervised by former prime minister Adrian Nastase. Romania's national council for academic titles found that 85 pages had been reproduced word for word.
Ponta's government attempted to dismantle the committee and transfer its powers to a body within the education ministry, which cleared him. Ponta relinquished his doctorate in 2014, but the education ministry did not formally withdraw his PhD until August 2016.
The same month, the council ruled that former interior minister and deputy prime minister Gabriel Oprea had plagiarised his dissertation.
Mihai Tudose, nominated prime minister in 2017, had already surrendered his doctorate after allegations of copying. He said he had paid the original author to use the material.
Investigations continued to implicate senior officials. Journalist Emilia Sercan reported in 2022 that Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca, a former general, had plagiarised material on 42 of the 138 pages of his 2003 dissertation. Ciuca denied the allegations. A criminal complaint prevented the university from examining the thesis for more than a year before prosecutors closed the case in March 2023 because it was time-barred.
Education minister Sorin Cimpeanu resigned in 2022 amid separate allegations, while Sercan reported that former interior minister Lucian Bode had copied nearly 20% of his dissertation. Babes-Bolyai University described Bode's work as "deeply flawed", but a national ethics committee subsequently cleared him.
The latest high-profile case concerns Justice Minister Radu Marinescu. In January 2026, Sercan alleged that he had 140 pages of his 247-page doctoral dissertation, defended at the University of Craiova in 2009.
Marinescu's Social Democrats backed him "without reservation" and accused Sercan of being an impostor. The university's ethics commission had not issued a decision more than 31 weeks after receiving the complaints, education news website Edupedu reported in August.
Marinescu left the government when the Social Democrats withdrew from the coalition in April, but was nominated again as justice minister by Prime Minister Luca Niculescu. Parliament approved the new minority government on October 20.
Sercan has investigated the doctoral qualifications of around 50 people, including ministers, university rectors, police chiefs, generals, prosecutors and judges. Her work prompted Romania's intelligence service to examine its own personnel, with as many as half of the doctorates reviewed found to contain plagiarism, she told the Global Investigative Journalism Network in 2022.
"Unfortunately it’s a national disease, people getting degrees that they do not deserve," said Paul Radu, co-founder of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, in the same interview.
Degrees caught in legal limbo
Serbia's Finance Minister Sinisa Mali has retained his doctorate despite repeated findings against his dissertation.
The University of Belgrade's ethics board concluded in November 2019 that Mali had "literally took over texts, or entire paragraphs, from the texts of other authors without listing the names of the authors", after weeks of student protests outside the rectorate.
The university senate annulled his doctorate in December 2019, but the Administrative Court overturned the decision on procedural grounds. The senate voided the degree again in December 2021, only for the court to order its restoration in March 2023, broadcaster N1 reported. Mali subsequently defended another doctorate at Slovakia's Technical University of Kosice in June 2023.
Slovakia has also been a source of academic integrity controversies. In 2020, the daily Dennik N found plagiarism in the dissertations of Prime Minister Igor Matovic, parliament speaker Boris Kollar and education minister Branislav Grohling.
Matovic admitted copying two books by Slovak economists in his master's dissertation, apologised and said he should lose his degree.
"I haven't looked at my diploma since 1998 and I will never do that again," he wrote on Facebook. He survived a no-confidence vote in July 2020.
Slovakia subsequently introduced legislation permitting degrees to be withdrawn for plagiarism, but it applies only to dissertations defended after 2020.
An investigation by T-invariant published on August 19 found that officials implicated in earlier cases had therefore retained their qualifications. They include intelligence chief Pavol Gaspar, whose 2011 master's thesis on corruption was found to contain extensive copying, and parliamentarian Marian Kery, whose dissertation allegedly reproduced another student's work almost verbatim.
"The practice of defending a dissertation in another country and then having the diploma nostrified at home is widespread in Eastern Europe and across the post-Soviet space," the investigation said.
Why plagiarism persists
Other countries have also struggled to impose meaningful penalties. Croatian science and education minister Pavo Barisic faced an ethics committee investigation in 2016. The committee found that he had reproduced text without attribution, but its conclusions were advisory and he remained in government.
In Bulgaria, Petar Iliev was nominated as deputy prime minister and interior minister in 2021 amid allegations that he had plagiarised a colleague's dissertation. Ukraine appointed Serhiy Shkarlet as acting education minister in 2020 despite evidence of plagiarism.
In Russia, the volunteer network Dissernet had identified around 5,600 suspected plagiarists by 2016, many of them officials and lawmakers. Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky retained his doctorate after the state attestation commission dropped its investigation that year.
Plagiarism scandals are not confined to the former communist bloc. Germany's defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg resigned in 2011 after his university withdrew his doctorate, while education minister Annette Schavan stepped down in 2013 following a similar decision.
In a 2017 paper published in the European Review, political scientist Theodor Tudoroiu compared several high-profile cases, arguing that academic plagiarism by senior officials reflected broader weaknesses in governance.
He described it as "a direct, aggressive, and effective threat against democracy itself."
One factor behind the scandals is the prestige attached to academic titles. In countries where doctoral qualifications carry significant social and professional weight, politicians may see a doctorate as a means of demonstrating membership of an intellectual elite.
"The problem boils down to the fact that in much of central Europe too much attention is paid to academic titles and too little to what they should really be about: namely, making a substantial contribution to the field," Brian Bloch, a lecturer at the University of Munster, wrote in Times Higher Education in 2021.
"These are very powerful, and usually very wealthy people. They want to show with these PhDs that they also belong to the intellectual elite," Zoltan Sipos, founder of Romanian investigative outlet Atlatszo Erdely, told GIJN.
Financial incentives also play a role. In Romania, postgraduate qualifications can help officials secure promotions and higher salaries. The availability of ghostwriters and the possibility of obtaining degrees abroad can further weaken scrutiny.
The most important distinction, however, is enforcement. Political interference, weak ethics commissions, procedural challenges and laws that do not apply retrospectively have repeatedly prevented universities from imposing sanctions.
"When the [plagiarism] case concerns a politician, and especially a minister, it is obvious that these committees and commissions do not even have credibility in what they say," Octavian Voiculescu, a Romanian scientist at Cambridge University, told Science|Business in 2023.
Voiculescu said Romanian university graduates were increasingly viewed with suspicion abroad. Academics and students in Vienna, Leiden and Israel told Science|Business that tolerance of plagiarism was one reason they were reluctant to return home, despite a government programme offering more than €150mn to attract Romanian scientists back.
For Sinkevicius, the immediate consequence is a deadline to amend his dissertation rather than the loss of his doctorate or political office. He must correct the identified passages by the end of April, after which the work will undergo further scrutiny.
Sercan argues that academic records provide a rare means of holding powerful figures accountable.
"They can put their money into accounts in Switzerland and other countries, they can put their properties in the name of another person or their family, but they can’t hide their books or their doctoral dissertation," she told GIJN.
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