Hungary's resilient president A man of honour, greatly impugned Mar 31st 2012, 17:50 by A.L.B | BUDAPEST

THERE are two certainties in life, mused Benjamin Franklin: death and taxes. If the great man were alive today, no doubt he would add a third: Hungarian politicians never resign.
President Pál Schmitt has ended what must be the worst week of his career. He spent some of it in Seoul glad-handing world leaders at the Nuclear Security Summit. Mr Schmitt has not previously been known for his thoughts on atomic weaponry or nuclear fusion. His expertise was thought to have been in sports and sports history.
Until Thursday, that is, when the senate of Semmelweis University voted to strip him of his doctorate. The decision followed months of scandal, after hvg.hu, a business-news portal, revealed that Mr Schmitt's doctoral thesis had been copied from other sources. The five-member committee said that 17 pages of it had been lifted word for word, and a further 180 had been partly copied.
The announcement triggered a rare cross-party consensus in Hungarian politics: the president should step down. Even Magyar Nemzet, a right-leaning daily that usually backs the government, published a passionate call for Mr Schmitt to quit.
Most analysts thought it was all over for Mr Schmitt. But then Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister and a party ally of Mr Schmitt's, stepped in. Asked if Mr Schmitt should resign, Mr Orbán replied that it was for him to decide.
So he did. Just like Ferenc Gyurcsány, the Socialist prime minister who in 2006 triggered days of unrest when he was caught admitting that his government had been lying "morning, noon and night", Mr Schmitt said he was staying put.
Luckily for the beleaguered president, state television was on hand to offer a sympathetic ear. Péter Obersovszky's interview with Mr Schmitt, broadcast on MTV1, was the sort of cringe-making encounter rarely seen in central Europe nowadays. As Mr Schmitt defended his thesis as “honest, manly work”, the interviewer enquired:

I have known Mr President for quite a while, and what I don't understand is this: why are you so restrained? What I mean is that you are a person much more passionate than this, even as president. If these documents had got out earlier, if you had put on your gloves, with the momentum characteristic of you, it is possible that this matter would have never got this far at all. 

Squirming? There's more.

Mr President, you have made it clear that you are going to defend your office from political attacks and that you are not willing to yield to political pressure. You are also proving now that the sportsman lives in you. But you were hurt in your honour as a human being; what is more as a popular person who is loved by many. Are you going to sue? Or is it your duty as president to endure this? 

For those who want more of this sort of thing, a full transcript is available at the Contrarian Hungarian, a liberal blog.
As for Mr Schmitt, he will now start work on a new degree, he says. Perhaps he could write about political pressure on Hungarian state television.(forrás: The Economist)