Last week, Greek Foreign Minister Evangelos Venizelos named new Ambassador – at -Large Giorgos Chatzimarkakis, a former MEP of the German neoloberal Free Democratic Party (FDP). Speaking in a festive ceremony Venizelos praised Chatimarkakis’ qualities saying among others several nice things like:
” Mr. Hatzimarkakis is an extremely experienced and European politician who had an impressive career in German politics and represented Germany for years in the European Parliament. Of course, now he is active in Greek public life. But he had the courage, a few days ago, to accept the government’s invitation for enlisting all of the national forces, now that we are fighting to complete the adjustment programme, to exit the Memorandum, the troika and the crisis, and to pass into another phase, now that there are very serious problems and challenges in the field of foreign policy and security and defense policy.”
What Venizelos omit to mention is that Giorgos Chatzimarkakis was accused of plagiarism and the Bonn University had stripped of his doctoral title in 2011 due to “numerous passages” that were taken from the works of others without quotation marks.
At that time, the Dean of Bonn university Günther Schulz justified the decision, saying that
“Chatzimarkakis breached university policy by failing to quote direct passages of other works appropriately; instead of using quotation marks to show that the passage was not written by Chatzimarkakis, he simply used a footnote at the end of the text referring to the work it came from.
“Such a practice gives the impression that it is Chatzimarkakis who is speaking, while in reality texts of other authors are being reproduced.”
A committee in charge of determining whether Chatzimarkakis was guilty of plagiarism said more than half of the pages of the dissertation contained passages not written by the FDP politician. (full article Deutsche Welle)
At the time of the embarrassing revelation, Chatzimarkakis was member of the European Parliament and member of the executive committee of the German Free Democratic Party (FDP), which was the junior partner in the government coalition.
After the incident, Giorgos Chatzimarkakis, born in Germany by Greek parents, saw the end of his political career in Germany and moved to Greece. Short before the European Elections in May 2014, Chatzimarkakis the party Greek European Citizens (Έλληνες Ευρωπαίοι Πολίτες) and sought to be elected again for the European Parliament.
However, Greeks decided to keep Chatzimarkakis-of-their-hearts in the country and just 1.44% of them -the majority of them from Crete – cast their votes for his party.
For politically disappearing Socialist-PASOK that seeks to gain the votes even from neighborhood cats, the rate 1.44% was apparently enough to offer former “Dr” Chatzmarkakis political shelter and a place in the Greek sun.
To be fair, we need to stress that Giorgos Chatzimarkakis was not the only German politician accused of plagiarism and stripped of his doctoral title. In the long list of German politicians and ex-Drs are among othera Defence Minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg who lost his Dr-Title in 2011, Education Minister Annette Schavan who was stripped of hers in 2013.
PS I hope, all these former German “PhDs”will not …reinvent themselves in Greece. We are large, but have no many vacancies at-large…
