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Bettel's thesis: On more than 96 percent of the pages, foreign texts were adopted
Photo: Reporter.lu
The online magazine Reporter.lu confronted the Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel with allegations of plagiarism.
In his thesis on possible reforms of the electoral system for the European Parliament from 1999, he is said to have adopted foreign texts on 54 of 56 pages without citing the source.
So he wrote only two pages himself - a few paragraphs in the introduction and an equally short conclusion.
A report on the website states: "Xavier Bettel's treatise 'Vers une réforme possible des modes de scrutin aux élections du Parlement Européen?'
is an impressive hodgepodge of copied passages that does not meet the usual academic requirements. "
Today's Prime Minister has not only copied sporadically or some passages, but pages long from other publications without indicating this in any form with comments or footnotes.
In addition, he has copied a total of 20 pages of his work from the homepage of the European Parliament without citing the source, it says on Reporter.lu.
On Wednesday, Bettel responded to the allegations: "From today's perspective, I see that it should have been done differently, perhaps should have done it differently," he said when asked by the dpa news agency.
He wrote the paper more than 20 years ago as part of a postgraduate course at Nancy University.
"As far as I can remember, I did this to the best of my knowledge and belief," he said.
Bettel stated that he "fully trusts the University of Nancy to assess whether the work in question meets the criteria of the time." If this is not the case, he accepts an appropriate decision.
Bettel had studied public law and political science at Nancy University.
At the same time, Bettel's political career was taking off.
At the age of 26, he was elected in 1999 as the youngest member of the Luxembourg Parliament at the time.
Bettel has been the head of government of Luxembourg since 2013.
atb / kha / dpa