All three politicians who are currently applying for the Chancellery have again been confronted with accusations of having worked improperly when writing books, in some cases to a greater extent than has previously been known.

This emerges from the statements of the "plagiarism hunter" Stefan Weber.

In the case of the Greens candidate Annalena Baerbock, Weber carried out the study of her book “Jetzt.

How We Renew our Land ”ended after the discovery of a hundred“ fragments of plagiarism ”.

This is not linked to the claim to have found all points worthy of criticism.

According to Weber, in addition to the previously known plagiarism, Baerbock added passages from the book “Neustaat”, which members of the Union faction of the Bundestag published last year.

Helene Bubrowski

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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Eckart Lohse

Head of the parliamentary editorial office in Berlin.

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Peter Carstens

Political correspondent in Berlin

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The green party headquarters did not respond to the new allegations in detail.

"Annalena Baerbock has already admitted technical mistakes," it said.

"As announced, the book will be revised thoroughly and with great care, the corresponding references will be added." This will take some time, the green press office said.

The accusations against Baerbock about the book, which first surfaced at the end of June, had significantly affected the Greens' election campaign, which had already stalled because of other misconducts.

In the book published in 2009 by the current Union Chancellor candidate Armin Laschet “The rising republic. Immigration as an opportunity ”Weber has now found 17 passages in which passages from other texts were not correctly taken over. Like Baerbock's book, Laschet's was already criticized in the summer. A spokesman for the North Rhine-Westphalian Prime Minister recalled on Tuesday that Laschet had initiated a "review process" at the end of July after information became known that there were obvious errors in his book. "He has repeatedly emphasized that conscientious work when writing works and respecting copyright law are also a question of respecting other authors for him," the statement said. The test process comprises several procedural steps "which naturally take time".

Plagiarism seeker Weber directs lesser allegations to the SPD chancellor candidate Olaf Scholz. However, they seemed so insignificant in scope and so unspecific in their characteristics that neither Scholz nor his political environment commented on them again. The press spokeswoman for the candidate for chancellor left a request unanswered. According to media reports, Weber wrote in Scholz's book “Hoffnungsland. A new German reality ”from 2017 provisionally found“ three verified fragments of plagiarism ”. According to the radio station Radio Hamburg, Scholz himself had already said at the beginning of August: "I was happy to write the book and put a lot of effort into it." When asked whether he could guarantee that everything was written by himself, Scholz replied: "Yes, these are my lyrics, my words."