Not just Collegium Humanum. How European politicians are building their careers on dubious degrees

Thursday, Apr 30, 2026

Examines global political scandals where leaders and officials fabricated credentials, highlighting a lack of academic verification for public roles.

🔗 Read the article on wyborcza.pl


[This is an automatically generated summary, for reference only]

The article details numerous instances across various European countries where politicians and public officials have been implicated in scandals related to falsified or exaggerated educational qualifications. In Poland, an investigation into Collegium Humanum revealed allegations of diploma mills and corruption involving high-ranking figures. The piece then provides extensive examples from Greece, where multiple ministers and officials resigned or faced scrutiny over questionable degrees; Italy, citing issues with former prime ministers and ministers regarding credentials; Romania, mentioning plagiarism accusations; and Spain, detailing cases where politicians were found to have misrepresented their academic achievements. A common thread across these diverse scandals is the lack of formal mechanisms in many countries for verifying the qualifications of state officials, allowing individuals to present unverified CVs.


🔗 Read the original article

© 2026 Pulse - Europe beyond the beat


PULSE is an initiative for cross-border collaborative journalism in Europe co-funded by the European Commission under Grant Agreement n. PO 4500158093.

PULSE – Europe beyond the beat is an initiative coordinated by OBCT which has been promoting intense journalistic cross-border collaborations in Europe since 2024. The main aim is to help strengthen the European public sphere by reporting and telling stories from new and diverse perspectives.

PULSE’s offering also includes the distribution of free content to third-party outlets and the animation of four thematic networks open to any European journalist interested in crucial issues such as EU enlargement, Europe and other global powers, the green transition, or media and information society.

PULSE is driven by a sort of virtual transnational newsroom made up of journalists from all the publications involved, which produces new journalistic content on European issues in a collaborative way on a daily basis, coming in many languages. A further layer of associated partners and journalists enriches PULSE’s editorial output, which amounts to over a thousand publications per year.