His anger has subsided a little, but it’s still there. The CSU often raises “a high moral standard, for example when it comes to criminalizing certain types of behavior. If we want to measure others against it, we should also apply this high standard to ourselves in general,” says Holm Putzke about the Martin case Huber. No, Huber did not commit a crime, Putzke knows that. He is a professor of criminal law at the University of Passau. But also district head of the Lower Bavarian CSU working group lawyers. And it annoys him how his CSU is dealing with the affair surrounding its general secretary.
It’s been a good week since Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) declared that CSU General Huber’s doctoral thesis “does not meet the scientific requirements of a dissertation”. That the “suspicion of deception” has not been proven, but is “close”. Whereupon Huber announced that he would no longer use his doctorate, but would otherwise continue as before. CSU boss Markus Söder immediately declared the case “closed” and his general indispensable. Since then, Bavarian politics has been strangely silent about the Huber affair. Not only the CSU, but also the opposition. Why?
For Putzke, the fact that Söder is keen to bury the matter quickly and quietly is mainly due to the fact that the CSU only had to experience a few months ago how embarrassing it is when its own Secretary General has to resign in a scandalous manner. Stephan Mayer only threw it down in the spring after he is said to have threatened a gossip reporter. “If Markus Söder were to lose another Secretary General now, that would not damage his own reputation,” says Putzke, who threw a proper outburst of anger on Facebook after Söder had immediately put a lid on the Huber affair.
“The topic is not over and I think the way the party is handling the process is catastrophic,” wrote Putzke, who until a few months ago was the CSU district chairman in Passau-Stadt. The fact that his party is simply going “to the order of the day” “devalues the doctorate as the highest academic degree”. “No matter how many compliance regulations can be passed at party conferences – if the reality is different, it’s all worthless. We don’t have to be surprised if the impression increasingly arises that you can get away with anything and almost has no consequences”, Putzke also wrote on Facebook.
The reactions were positive, but not overly lavish. In fact, with his anger, Putzke is pretty lonely in the CSU, where some – by the way – have long considered him a troublemaker. Anyone who listens to the party hears this sentence again and again: “The topic is closed.” That says, for example, Konrad Körner, district head of the Junge Union (JU) Mittelfranken and member of the CSU party executive. The lawyer himself has a doctorate and does not think that Huber and Söder “continue as if nothing had happened”. On the contrary, Huber “draw consequences by no longer holding the doctorate”. Yes, says Körner, “LMU saw misconduct from an academic point of view, but that doesn’t diminish his suitability as a politician.” And Huber is definitely “a good Secretary General”.
The reluctance of the SPD can probably be explained by Franziska Giffey’s fraudulent title
Something similar is said almost everywhere in the CSU. Sure, the mask affair, the Mayer affair, many are simply fed up with the ugly headlines that their party keeps fabricating. And not everyone is convinced of the work of the rather invisible General Huber. Still, most seem honestly convinced when they say they see no scandal in the title affair and consider the matter settled. The fact that the state elections are approaching does the rest to ensure that the broad majority in the CSU has no interest in dealing with the Huber case any longer than is absolutely necessary. When an important election is coming up, this party still pulls together for success.
The silence of the competition is therefore even more interesting. A CSU affair not a year before the state elections, in other times it would have been a gift for the parties in the opposition. Now, in November 2022, you have to specifically ask the head of the Bavarian SPD to elicit a comment from him. Oh, says Florian von Brunn, the person Huber is simply “too unimportant to concern myself with it”. For him, his affair was “just a footnote in politics”. Which is firstly a nice play on words, secondly quite evil, and thirdly: in need of explanation.
The truth is that internal reasons also play a role in the SPD, which is why hardly anything is heard about the CSU general and his highly embarrassing doctor failure. If SPD leader Brunn were to call for Huber’s resignation, the CSU would promptly ask why the Free University of Berlin (FU) had withdrawn her doctorate from the former Federal Minister for Family Affairs, Franziska Giffey (SPD) – and why Giffey resigned, but directly applied for the SPD as mayor of Berlin? The other parties in the state parliament, who have also been confronted with accusations of plagiarism, albeit of very different types and at different levels, would also have to reckon with such counterattacks.
One can hear that voters can hardly score points with title affairs
One hears behind closed doors from the opposition that title affairs are no longer suitable for campaigns against political opponents if one’s own party has already been affected. There is little to gain there, also because the electorate has become a “habit”. In recent years there have been regular allegations of plagiarism against politicians, and the excitement has steadily decreased. CSU politician Putzke also speaks of a “habituation effect”. If the Huber case had been “one of the first cases, it could have hit him harder”.
Of course, there are differences between the individual affairs. Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (CSU) was federal minister when he resigned in 2011 due to allegations of plagiarism, and Franziska Giffey was also a minister – while Huber’s main concern is whether he can keep his party office. But it is interesting that the Bavarian opposition is reluctant to criticize Huber out of self-protection, while the CSU considered the resignation of Minister Giffey in May 2021 to be “imperative”, as Markus Blume, then Secretary General, put it.
In the meantime, Blume has a new job: Minister of Science. Of course, one would like to know from him whether scientific work is not devalued by the Huber case and the way the CSU deals with it. It would also be interesting to know how Blume sees the difference between the Huber case and the Giffey case, in which he advocated resigning. Some in the CSU emphasize that Giffey’s title was revoked because the university saw the deception as proven, unlike Huber. However, it remains unclear how Markus Blume assesses all of this. When asked, he declined to comment.