Nausėda urges allowing prime minister to start work amid dissertation debate

Amid ongoing social media discussions about possible plagiarism in Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius’s doctoral dissertation, President Gitanas Nausėda has called for allowing the prime minister to begin his work and demonstrate his leadership, LRT reports.

“Let’s let the man start working. Should he now have to spend months explaining whether he wrote a proper dissertation or not? Let him start proving what he can do as prime minister. That’s what we should demand of him,” Nausėda told journalists in Klaipėda on Saturday.

The president expressed skepticism about the sudden interest in Sinkevičius’s dissertation, which he said had not been a topic of discussion until the latter became prime minister. “There are good dissertations, there are bad dissertations,” Nausėda said, adding that he would not assess the prime minister’s work “like some political scientists who haven’t even read the dissertation.” He noted that he had already evaluated it as “weak.”

BNS reported that this week, the Academic Ethics and Procedure Control Service received a complaint about possible plagiarism in Sinkevičius’s dissertation and forwarded it to ISM University of Management and Economics. The university stated that the complaint would be reviewed under its internal procedures, with its Ethics Commission required to decide within ten calendar days whether to investigate the matter.

Sinkevičius has stated that he wrote the dissertation himself and remains calm, asserting that any investigation would conclude in his favor. He earned a bachelor’s degree in management and business administration from Vilnius University in 2007, a bachelor’s degree in law from Mykolas Romeris University in 2008, a master’s degree in marketing and management from ISM University in 2009, and defended his doctoral dissertation at the same university in 2015.