Opposition PM candidate Karácsony was not qualified to teach at Corvinus university?

Gergely Karácsony, the mayor of Budapest who is vying to become the opposition alliance’s candidate for prime minister, has insisted that his stint teaching at Budapest’s Corvinus University from 2004 had been with the university’s blessing, even though he did not possess the requisite foreign-language qualification and was not a doctoral candidate.

The daily Magyar Nemzet said on Wednesday that Karácsony, who co-heads the Párbeszéd party, did not dispute working at Corvinus in the absence of the necessary qualifications, but he blamed the university for the oversight. At a forum in Szentendre on Tuesday,

Karácsony told journalists that he had only earned 100,000 forints (EUR 285) a month at the university,

the same as a teaching assistant. The newspaper added, however, that after 2008, Karácsony had been employed as an assistant professor for four years and had certainly enjoyed a higher salary while not meeting the appointment criteria for the post.

The Education Office recently concluded an investigation which found that Corvinus had employed Karácsony illegally.

Three out of four voting-age Hungarians would like to see Ferenc Gyurcsány, the leader of the opposition Democratic Coalition, retire from politics, according to a fresh survey conducted this month by Nezopont Institute on the occassion of the 15th anniversary of the former Socialist prime minister’s infamous Őszöd speech. In the leaked speech in September in 2006,