Hungarian President Pal Schmitt cancelled all his engagements Friday, news agency MTI reported, amid speculation he could resign after he was stripped of his university doctorate over plagiarism. Schmitt's spokesman also said the president would make an announcement on national radio and television at about 8:00 pm (1800 GMT).
"Pal Schmitt will answer all pertinent questions this evening on national television," Norbert Kiss told journalists gathered in front of the president's residence in Budapest, without giving any more details. The Hungarian press widely expected a resignation Friday and was already debating possible successors. Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a close ally of Schmitt, told public radio that the president alone must decide whether he should resign from the largely ceremonial post.
"Nobody except him can decide," Orban said in his first reaction to the plagiarism scandal. Schmitt was stripped of his 1992 doctorate title Thursday after Budapest's Semmelweis University found he had copied "word-for-word" large passages of another writer's work in his thesis on the history of the Olympic Games. Schmitt returned on Thursday from a trip to South Korea but dodged journalists waiting for him at the airport.
Opposition parties meanwhile called on him to resign. "He must go because he has become unworthy of the post of president," said Socialist party leader Attila Mesterhazy. An investigative committee from Semmelweis University had found Tuesday that Schmitt had copied large parts of his thesis, but ruled that the text complied with requirements at the time and put the blame on the university for not noticing.
Nevertheless, the university's senate decided to strip him of his doctorate. Weekly HVG first outed Schmitt in January, reporting that the "majority" of his thesis was a "word-for-word translation" of a text written in French in the 1980s by late Bulgarian sports expert and diplomat Nikolai Georgiev.
Soon after, respected news website index.hu said a further 17 pages of Schmitt's conclusions had been word-for-word translations of a dissertation by German professor Klaus Heinemann, written in English in 1991. Last year, German defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg resigned after his doctorate was rescinded for plagiarism, leading to scrutiny of the academic achievements of other public figures.
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