The Minister of Labor, Family and Youth in Austria, Christine Spacher, announced yesterday evening, Saturday, her resignation, a year after assuming her duties, the day after she was accused of stealing several university work.
In a statement, Achbacher, a member of the conservative Chancellor Sebastian Kurtz, declared her resignation from her post with the aim of "protecting her family", denouncing the "hostility, political manipulation and attacks" directed against her with "unbearable force."
The 37-year-old minister was accused of "plagiarism, the use of false quotes and ignorance of the origins of the German language" in her MA thesis in 2006, according to the blog of Stephan Weber of the expert who specializes in monitoring forgeries in university degrees.
She obtained her university degree with "very good" from the University of Applied Sciences in Wiener-Neustadt near Vienna.
The same accusations were against the manuscript of the thesis that I submitted on “Innovative Corporate Management” in May 2020 to the Technical University of Bratislava in Slovakia at the height of the health crisis.
Weber wrote that what the minister presented was nothing more than a "handful of nonsense and trivialities" on 134 pages, at least a fifth of which was taken from other sources without quoting the quotes, especially from an article in "Forbes" magazine.
Following criticism from the opposition, Christine Ashbacher “denied” these “insinuations”, asserting that she wrote her work “based on my best knowledge and convictions.”
Counselor Kurtz announced "respect" for the minister´s decision to resign, indicating through his Twitter account that the name of her successor would be announced Monday.
In neighboring Germany, two conservative ministers were forced to resign in 2011 and 2013 over similar charges.
