One would-be Romanian president is a plagiarist. But will voters care?

When the US has elected a convicted felon accused of numerous other serious crimes and found liable for what is commonly understood as rape, the idea that plagiarism should disqualify a candidate may seem a little quaint.

Moreover, it is revealing that in the torrent of abuse that Donald Trump routinely hurls at “crooked” Joe Biden, the 1987 allegations that his predecessor plagiarised a law review article for a term paper he wrote at law school has never featured – even though it played a big role in derailing his first bid to be US president (Biden said he had misunderstood citation rules). 

Back in the Old World, Romania’s former prime minister, Victor Ponta, certainly doesn’t think that his much more lurid history of academic fraud should preclude him from running in his country’s presidential election in May.

Ponta, who confirmed his candidacy last week, has run for president before. That was in 2014, when he was still prime minister and leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) despite Nature magazine’s allegation in 2012 that more than half of his 2003 doctorate of law dissertation was lifted from other texts.

Following that revelation, a protracted tug-of-war ensued, involving different academic committees and their reorganisations, the Ministry of Education and a lot of lawyers, which saw the allegations validated and then dismissed – until Ponta shocked Romania by boldly writing to the rector of the University of Bucharest to renounce his document and passing legislation allowing individuals to renounce academic degrees voluntarily.

Incidentally, Ponta’s doctoral supervisor was Romania’s serving prime minister, Adrian Năstase, who has since served a prison sentence for corruption. Such charges also ultimately led to Ponta’s downfall as prime minister in 2015, the latest in a string of scandals that also included the revelation that the master’s in international criminal law listed in his CV from Sicily’s University of Catania was also fake.

“After I step down from the political scene, I wish to pursue a new doctorate while adhering to and respecting all of the standards and requirements,” Ponta declared. This promise has yet to be fulfilled. And yet he is back on the scene, with big ambitions.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that Ponta does not view academic fraud as a barrier to his winning the presidential election – which is being rerun after Romania’s constitutional court annulled November’s results amid claims of Russian manipulation (much to the wrath of Trump’s vice-president, JD Vance). After all, academic fraud is common among leaders in the post-Communist world. Russia’s own leader since 1999, Vladimir Putin, has been accused on multiple occasions of holding a fake doctorate based on a copy-and-paste dissertation.

Nor do the leaders of the country he invaded, Ukraine, have a much better history. None of the doctorates of Ukraine’s  past presidents are above suspicion (current president Volodymyr Zelensky has honorary doctorates but does not claim to have a real one). The most prominent scandal was that of Victor Yanukovych, the Russian-backed president deposed in 2014’s popular Euromaidan revolution. Supposedly a professor, chair of department and member of the National Academy of Sciences, in reality Yanukovych never taught and did not even know how to spell “professor”, earning him the nickname “proffesor”.

One of Ukraine’s former prime ministers was not even sure whether he held a doctorate at all – or if he had ever had one in the past. When journalists asked Olexiy Goncharuk about his PhD in law, the then prime minister (August 2019 to March 2020) stated in response: “Look, no one deprived me of this status. Once upon a time, a long time ago, I really had a non-state diploma…that is how it is officially called.”

Once upon a time, Victor Ponta also had a doctorate, and it was also in law, and he also served as prime minister. And the parallel is unsurprising. After all, Romania and Ukraine have a lot in common, including a Communist past, an uncertain future in Russia’s shadow, and high levels of corruption. In such countries, fraud is perceived as the norm – including academic fraud.

Let us not forget that Ponta was not stripped of his doctorate by some high academic commission, as he should have been. Instead, he cut himself out of the University of Bucharest’s records. And even though he is not the PSD’s official candidate this time around, he evidently still thinks he can paste himself into the president’s office.

Each society has to decide for itself what kinds of crimes and misdemeanours should be a bar – officially or unofficially – to running for public office. There is no commonly accepted view on this, even within the European Union, so Ponta is officially good to go. And just as the US presidential race revealed American voters’ modern view – 40 years on from Biden’s withdrawal – on whether their head of state’s moral character matters, so will Romania’s.

Ararat Osipian is founding fellow of the New University in Exile Consortium at the New School, New York. He was twice a fellow at New Europe College Institute for Advanced Study in Bucharest.