- Associated Press - Tuesday, March 1, 2011

BERLIN (AP) — Germany’s defense minister quit Tuesday amid persistent allegations that he plagiarized parts of his doctoral thesis, and his resignation deprives Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives of a man long rated the country’s most popular politician.

Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, 39, said he had decided to go “not just because of my faulty doctoral work” but because the persistent focus on it threatened to overshadow duties such as overseeing a major overhaul of the German military and troops’ deployment in Afghanistan.

“It is the most painful step of my life,” Mr. Guttenberg told reporters in a hastily convened appearance at his ministry. “Because my office, the Bundeswehr, academia and the parties that support me faced potential damage, I am drawing the consequences that I have and would have demanded of others.”

Mrs. Merkel said she accepted his resignation “with a heavy heart” and praised Mr. Guttenberg as someone with an “exceptional political talent.”

Bayreuth University revoked Mr. Guttenberg’s academic title last week, saying the minister had “seriously violated” its standards by failing to credit sufficiently some of his sources, but the minister at first sought to cling on.

Mr. Guttenberg was the rising star of Germany’s center-right in the past two years. He built a reputation as a plain-speaking man of action in a brief stint as economy minister and then, after Germany’s 2009 elections, as defense minister.

In that job, he pushed through a plan to end conscription, part of an effort to slim down the German military and make it better adapted to an era in which it faces growing demands to deploy overseas.

But Mr. Guttenberg’s crisis management after the plagiarism allegations emerged two weeks ago — and then kept coming — was less impressive.

He initially issued a statement describing them as “absurd,” then said he would stop using his title as a doctor only temporarily while the university looked into the accusations.

Mr. Guttenberg told jeering lawmakers last week that he “did not deliberately cheat, but made serious errors.”

Mrs. Merkel stood by Mr. Guttenberg, saying a week ago that she appointed him as defense minister, not as an academic assistant.

But the scandal wouldn’t go away, raising the possibility that Mr. Guttenberg would be a liability rather than an asset in upcoming state elections.

“I think that, if this had carried on longer … it could have done more damage than would making a clean cut now and looking forward,” said Oskar Niedermayer, a political science professor at Berlin’s Free University.

Six of Germany’s 16 states are due to hold regional elections before the end of September. Three of those come in March — one of which, in the southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, offers a tough test for Mrs. Merkel’s center-right coalition.

Mr. Guttenberg is a member of the Christian Social Union, the Bavaria-only sister party to Mrs. Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. The CSU itself doesn’t have to face voters this year, but Mr. Guttenberg had been expected to campaign for Mrs. Merkel’s party.

The opposition took aim at Mrs. Merkel for clinging to Mr. Guttenberg, even after she received an open letter Monday from some 23,000 doctoral students and others protesting her decision to keep him.

Thomas Oppermann, a senior lawmaker with the center-left Social Democrats, said the resignation was “overdue and inevitable.”

Mrs. Merkel “has embarrassed herself, her credibility is damaged, and she has damaged the reputation of politics,” he said.

Mr. Niedermayer, the political scientist, said Mrs. Merkel did herself few favors by distinguishing between Mr. Guttenberg’s activities as a politician and academic, since the problems with his thesis went to the heart of the reputation for credibility on which he built his political career.

However, he said he doesn’t see “serious negative effects for her in the long term.”

As for Mr. Guttenberg’s future, Mrs. Merkel said she was “convinced that we will, in whatever form, have the opportunity to work together in the future.”

She said it was too early to name a successor but a decision would be made “shortly,” while Mr. Guttenberg’s CSU has the right to name the new minister.

Polls early in the plagiarism scandal suggested that Mr. Guttenberg remained popular with voters and a majority wanted him to stay on.

“I was always ready to fight, but I have reached the limits of my strength,” Mr. Guttenberg said Tuesday.

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