Berlin, August 21st, 2026 (The Berlin Spectator) – Berlin’s Justice Senator Felor Badenberg (CDU) has asked the University of Cologne to independently examine her doctoral dissertation after an Austrian plagiarism investigator accused her of extensive academic misconduct, according to German-language media. The timing could hardly be worse: Berlin holds its House of Representatives election on September 20th, and Badenberg is running as the CDU’s top candidate on the district list in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf.
Stefan Weber, a communications scholar based in Vienna who has built a reputation as a “plagiarism hunter,” says he identified 83 problematic passages in Badenberg’s law dissertation, submitted at the University of Cologne. According to Weber, these include individual sentences and entire paragraphs lifted from other sources, as well as irregularities in the thesis’s acknowledgments section. Weber, who operates as a licensed investigator under Austrian commercial law, declined to say who commissioned the analysis, citing professional confidentiality obligations.
Badenberg has not addressed the specific findings. In a statement, she said the dissertation had been written “to the best of my knowledge and belief,” adding that she had asked the University of Cologne to conduct a thorough, independent review of the disputed passages.
A Familiar Pattern
Weber’s track record includes several politically charged cases. In May, the extremist right-wing AfD’s parliamentary group in Thuringia, led by Björn Höcke, commissioned him to examine the thesis of CDU state premier Mario Voigt, who had already lost his doctoral title over separate findings by the Technical University of Chemnitz in January.
Weber says he has reviewed hundreds of academic and published works since 2007, and that 16 degrees have been formally revoked following investigations by his team — among the public figures he has scrutinized are former Green Party leaders Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck, CDU politicians Armin Laschet and Norbert Lammert, and constitutional law scholar Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf. None of these allegations have been confirmed in court.
Baerbock acknowledged citation errors in a book in 2021 without a reprint. Brosius-Gersdorf withdrew her candidacy for Germany’s constitutional court, citing what she called an unfair and defamatory campaign against her.
Political Stakes
Badenberg has served as Berlin’s Justice and Consumer Protection Senator since 2023. Born in Iran, she came to Germany in 1987, studied law, and later worked at Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, where she headed the unit on right-wing extremism and counter-terrorism — including surveillance of the AfD as a suspected extremist organization, before becoming the agency’s first female vice president in 2022. She joined the CDU in 2024 and has sat on the party’s federal executive board since February.
She had once been floated as a possible successor to Governing Mayor Kai Wegner (CDU), who is not seeking reelection after criticism of his handling of January’s major power outage. That role instead went to Finance Senator Stefan Evers, now the CDU’s lead candidate, who defended Badenberg on Wednesday: “Anyone who knows her knows the integrity, seriousness and professionalism with which she carries out her office,” he said, adding that he would not speculate on the origin or motive behind the allegations.
Berlin’s Recent Plagiarism Cases
Badenberg’s case follows several other high-profile doctoral scandals in Berlin politics. Former Environment and Transport Senator Manja Schreiner (CDU) resigned in 2024 after the University of Rostock stripped her of her doctorate over dissertation errors, saying she wanted to spare the Senate further damage — while maintaining she had never intentionally deceived anyone.
Economy Senator Franziska Giffey (SPD) lost her own doctorate in 2021 over improperly credited sources, a scandal that forced her resignation as federal family minister before she later returned to become Berlin’s Governing Mayor.
