Fake degrees are a political contagion.
Covid-19 might have passed, but the latest outbreak of titulitis is tearing through Spain. A term used to refer to politicians’ obsession with higher qualifications, titulitis has recently resulted in the resignation of three regional representatives of both the Conservative People’s Party (PP) and the Socialists. But this contagious virus—or variants of it—is not confined to Spain. Over the last decade or so, politicians in the US and elsewhere in Europe have tried to make themselves appear more impressive than they are—whether through vagueness, embellishment, or outright fabrication.
Noelia Núñez, previously tipped as a “rising star” within the PP, was the first to go at the end of July. Núñez resigned when it emerged that she had not completed her degree in Law and Public Administration, as stated on her CV. Her departure was quickly followed by Vox’s Ignacio Higuera, a member of Extremadura’s regional government, and the Socialists’ José Ángel, a minister in Valencia, both of whom claimed to have degrees that were not offered by their universities at the time of their attendance. It also transpired that Ana Milán, a member of Madrid’s PP-led government, holds a diploma in public administration, not a degree in political science, as was advertised on an election brochure almost twenty years ago.
This isn’t the first outbreak of Spanish titulitis in recent years. In September 2018 (the year that Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez came to power), Socialist health minister Carmen Montón resigned after irregularities were discovered in her master’s degree from Madrid’s King Juan Carlos University (URJC), which seems to make remarkably few demands to obtain a title. Earlier that year, Madrid’s then-PP president Cristina Cifuentes had also been under pressure to quit, after it was found that she had gained a Master’s in Autonomic Law from the same university without attending classes or writing a dissertation. Cifuentes was eventually forced out after the release of a leaked CCTV footage allegedly showing her trying to steal face cream from a Madrid department store. Sánchez’s 2012 doctoral thesis in economics came under suspicion during these scandals, but he refuted plagiarism accusations by publishing it online.
Another protagonist of 2018’s “mastergate” saga was then-PP leader Pablo Casado. When Casado admitted he hadn’t attended classes or taken exams to obtain his master’s from the easygoing URJC (the same qualification as Cifuentes), one magistrate claimed that it had been a “gift,” bestowed because of his political connections. More damaging to Casado’s reputation was his claim to possess a postgraduate qualification from Harvard—when in fact he had attended a four-day course at Madrid’s IESE Business School, which is linked to the American university. Attendance was the only requirement, which presumably made it a grueling affair compared to the remote, non-assessed “master’s.” Casado staggered on until early 2022, when accusations that he had launched a smear campaign against Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the PP’s Madrid premier, forced his resignation.
CV-related scandals have also erupted elsewhere in Europe over the last few years. Shortly before becoming Italy’s prime minister in June 2018, Giuseppe Conte was criticized for claiming to have “perfected” his legal studies at New York University. It emerged that Conte, a lawyer and academic who has led Italy’s Five Star Movement since 2021, had been given permission to use the university’s law library between 2008 and 2014. The claim on his CV was justified, if a little vague: unlike his Spanish counterparts, Conte had not claimed to possess a degree that he did not actually have. He survived the scrutiny and served as Italy’s prime minister until February 2021.
The pressure on German politicians to have PhDs is so intense that some take shortcuts to obtain them. In 2011, it emerged that then-Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg had plagiarized parts of his 2006 doctoral thesis. An aristocrat who at the time polled as the country’s most popular politician, Guttenberg quit after the University of Bayreuth revoked his doctorate and more than 50,000 academics signed a letter calling for his resignation. German media had a great time, creating nicknames such as Baron Cut-and-Paste, zu Copyberg, and zu Googleberg. One wonders whether Guttenberg would have completed his thesis even more quickly had ChatGPT been available.
Reacting to the Guttenberg scandal, Germany’s Education Minister Annette Schavan said that “as someone who was herself awarded a doctorate 31 years ago,” she was “ashamed.” Just two years later, Schavan was forced to resign after Düsseldorf’s Heinrich Heine University revoked her 1980 PhD, after finding that parts of it had been “systematically and intentionally” copied. She took legal action against the university, but her appeal was rejected in 2014. Strangely, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU Commission since 2019, survived a similar scandal in 2016, while serving as Germany’s defense minister. Although Hanover University found that some of her 1990 PhD thesis was plagiarized, it decided not to revoke the degree. The reviewing panel decided it was accidental.
The most extreme case of titulitis seen in the US centered on George Santos. Within weeks of being elected as a Republican U.S. Representative for parts of New York at the end of 2022, Santos was found to have lied about graduating from Baruch College and working for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Santos had also made up aspects of his biography, such as his mother dying in the 9/11 attacks and his grandparents escaping the Nazis during World War II. When the latter was exposed as false, Santos offered an unintentionally hilarious response: “I never claimed to be Jewish. I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’” Santos was expelled from the House of Representatives in December 2023, and in April this year was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for fraud and identity theft.
Compared to most of these scandals, that involving the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer might look rather tame. Back in February, the BBC revealed that Rachel Reeves had only worked at the Bank of England for five-and-a-half years, not the decade she had claimed in public. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer brushed the matter off, saying that it referred to events that had taken place “many years ago”—although Reeves has repeatedly referred to her “ten-year” Bank of England stint as proof that she’s fit to run the UK’s economy.
Reacting to the recent wave of CV-related resignations in Spain, labor minister and Second Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz insisted that higher education does not make someone a good politician—“I say that as someone who has known many ministers with tons of degrees who are terrible when it comes to public administration.” Maybe that’s because those degrees aren’t what they seem—or because they were awarded by Madrid’s URJC, an institution that redefines the phrase “distance learning.”
