Mired in controversy: Annette Schavan resigned as Germany’s Education and Research Minister early last month over a plagiarism scandal.

It’s election season and our writer wonders when everyone will start distinguishing bread-and-butter issues from fancy rhetoric.

IT IS Superwahljahr for both Germany and Malaysia. Crowned Germany’s “Word of the Year” in 1994, Superwahljahr refers to a year that’s chock-full of state and federal level elections.

As modern political convention dictates, skeletons are being coaxed or shaken out of closets, knives are being sharpened and hatchets thought to be long buried come a-leaping out of their shallow graves.

It helps to watch your words: they could come back and bite your behind. In societies with a somewhat healthy press, that could prove to be your undoing. In others, you’re given additional column space to air what you claim was not what you previously claimed.

Anyway, first blood has long been drawn here in Germany. Former Education Minister Annette Schavan resigned early last month amidst allegations of plagiarising parts of her 33-year-old doctoral thesis.

Wikipedia states that a blogger using the pseudonym Robert Schmidt (a member of the research network VroniPlag Wiki) alleged that he had found plagiarised text in Schavan’s doctoral thesis, which was ironically entitled “Character and conscience: Studies on the conditions, necessities, and demands on the development of conscience in the present day.”

Consequently, the University of Düsseldorf investigated the charge and found text attribution lacking and so revoked her PhD for “systematic and deliberate” plagiarism. Furthermore, she had attained this degree via a “Grundständige Promotion”, an arrangement that awards doctoral degrees without having previous degrees. The revocation thus put her in the unique position of being a Minister of Education and Research with no university degree.

She resigned but not without promising a legal fight against the university’s findings.

It also didn’t help that she had shared her two-cents when former Defence Minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg quit office for the same offence in 2011.

“As someone who wrote a doctorate myself 31 years ago and has worked in a professional capacity with many PhD candidates,” she said, “I am ashamed, not only privately.”

Most, however, seemed more forgiving of Schavan because it wasn’t a copy-and-paste job like Guttenberg’s, but failure in attributing long-known, existing works. Simply put, like attributing the story of “Rapunzel” to the Brothers Grimm.

Die Welt’s editorial opined: “The passages in the thesis are not new. They have existed since 1980, the cited works even longer. Schavan will be handled more severely than tax dodgers who hide their assets deliberately for years.

Such sinners enjoy immunity after 13 years. Schavan is denied the same after 33 – in a case that is morally light years away from tax evasion, and is by nature very open to interpretation.” All papers, however, agreed that a plagiarising education minister doesn’t make a good role model – and so must go.

When we discussed this as a spoken exercise during an English lesson, one of my students wryly remarked: “Clearly there are many people in Germany with a lot of time on their hands to Google other people’s dissertations to see if they’ve copied.” The irritated father of two elaborated that he would rather a minister with a flawed thesis but who tangibly improves the public education system, than someone who grandstands yet does nothing.

Risqué followed deception shortly after, involving former Minister for Economics and Technology, Rainer Bruedele. A journalist alleged that he had made inappropriate passes at her at a political gathering at a bar in January 2012.

It sparked a debate about sexism in politics although his party colleagues questioned the journalist’s motives for reporting the “offence” a year after the fact. Nothing much has transpired since.

Let’s be clear: there are politicians – both straight and gay – who have and do use sex as a corrupt means to a corrupt end. The keyword here is “corrupt” and for that, they must face severe consequences.

The challenge is to learn to distinguish smut from bread-and-butter issues and ensure elected representatives deliver on their election promises and uphold their oaths of public office. I couldn’t care who they bed – unless it somehow involves illegal kickbacks or the miscarriage of justice.

This probably also explains the long-standing careers of openly gay politicians in some countries, for instance, Berlin’s mayor since 2001, Klaus Wowereit.

However, he is getting flak now for the failure-riddled Berlin Airport project and for the more recent plan to knock down the longest-remaining part of the Berlin Wall to build luxury apartments. Notice something? Both involve public interests.

And let’s please banish religion from politics. Fanatical frothing often only obscures plain truths.

This proposition certainly gets my vote!

> Brenda Benedict is a Malaysian living in Frankfurt. She suggests election ballots have an extra box in which people can fill in the names of their preferred representatives and not individuals predetermined for them.

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