Allegations of plagiarism haunt advisor Mertis!
Austrian plagiarism expert Stefan Weber accused German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, a member of the CDU party, of committing literary theft in his 2002 book titled "Mut zur Zukunft. Wie Deutschland wieder an die Spitze kommt" (Courage for the Future: How Germany Can Return to the Top). The Berliner Zeitung published a report on this issue in its Saturday edition.
The book consists of 317 pages, and Weber identified 18 locations containing a total of 25 instances of citation without mentioning the source. The book does not contain any index of sources.
Feber noted that he conducted this investigation voluntarily and without any funding or official mandate, emphasizing that he focuses on the work of individuals in influential public positions. He submitted a 22-page report detailing the cases of citation.
Among the sources that Merz is alleged to have quoted without attribution are: Friedrich von Heusinger, head of the liaison office of the Economic Council of the CDU party in Brussels; the late CDU politician Hans-Joachim Meyer; the science journalist from "Die Zeit" Martin Spiewak; the economist Burkhard Vihner; and the former Prime Minister of Bavaria Edmund Stoiber from the CSU party.
One example of this alleged quote appears in a quote from Schtuyber about the structural and cohesion funds in the European Union. The original text from Schtuyber states: "The current system of redistribution through structural and cohesion funds is extremely inefficient, very costly, overly centralized, and highly susceptible to fraud." Meanwhile, the text from Mertz is very similar with slight differences.
Nevertheless, the researcher in plagiarism issues, Jochen Tsenhöfer from Luxembourg, considered Weber's report to be exaggerated, explaining that the accused paragraphs do not exceed 5.68% of the book's pages, and often consist of individual sentences related to the presentation of facts, as in the case of the Pisa study.
Tsenhofer pointed out that Weber sometimes made mistakes in identifying the quoted passages, as he accused Merz of copying an evaluation while the evaluation was actually his own. He confirmed that some of the speeches Weber relied on as evidence were published after the deadline for submitting the manuscript of the book, which weakens his argument. Tsenhofer emphasized that these quotations do not affect the quality or content of the book, noting that talking about a "scandal" in this context is merely media exaggeration. He added that these cases are far less serious than similar issues faced by Annalena Baerbock or Alice Weidel. For his part, government spokesman Stefan Cornelius refused to comment on the matter on behalf of the chancellor.